In the course of their work last year, various members of TIME'S newsgathering staff were 1) threatened by a public official's pals and a politician's mother, 2) soaked in perfume for two weeks, 3) spied on over television, 4) hypnotized in the leg and 5) strapped into a death chair.

Because newsmen seem to have a talent for getting involved in misadventures which rarely reach the record books, I asked our correspondents to tell me about their most harrowing, amusing and exciting experiences while working on TIME stories during 1951. Although, of course, many of our reporters were risking their lives, a number of their accounts were so engaging that I thought you would like to hear some of them.

Ed Ogle, whom many of you will remember from our Kefauver telecasts, appeared to have the highest incidence of nip-ups and pratfalls. Since taking charge of our Denver bureau in March, he has been bucked off a horse, bounced out of a plane, fallen on by a Christmas tree and had his face rubbed sportively in a snowbank by a gang of high-school football players.

Washington Correspondent Frances Levison, while covering the Kefauver hearings, discovered a new hazard to her profession when she was called by her bureau's deskman, who asked: "Where were you? We were watching TV and you weren't at the press table."

The record for peregrination probably goes to Jim Bell, who stepped out of the Korean fire to cover the Middle East's sizzling frying pan. He cabled: "I've added 42 pages to my passport's normal 48 pages. Security functionaries in this part of the world love my passport. They play it like an accordion. I've made eight trips to Iran, seven to Egypt, six to Syria, three each to Turkey and Iraq, two each to Greece and Bahrein, one each to Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar ... My wife wistfully wishes she'd married a traveling salesman."

The henchmen of a Boston councilman offered to break Correspondent Jeff Wylie's head if he tried to publish a picture of their boss. Chicago Correspondent Robert Schulman interviewed the mother of a politician, was told:

"If you don't do right by Bill, I intend to pay you a visit you won't forget."

Some stories have relatively happy endings. En route from London to Rome, Tom Dozier was aroused early one morning on shipboard, made his pajama-clad way to the door and, blinking, saw Poet T. S. Eliot bearing a written invitation to dinner. In West Texas, Bill Johnson was sent a desperately needed telegraphic money order, only to learn that the sole Western Union operator within 100 miles had just broken her arm.

He waited for the arm to be set, accompanied the operator to the office for the money order, commented: "I was thankful it wasn't her leg."

Chicago Correspondent Margo Parish was asked to try out the University of Illinois' "stuttering" machine, which mixes up the subject's reactions by playing his words back to him a fraction of a second after he has uttered them. "Are there any lasting effects from the experiment?" our query asked. She tried the machine, determined to show what self-control would do. "I started yapping gaily about TIME reporters being expendable," she related, "when the delaying action was switched on. Try as I might, I stammered, stuttered, strained, perspired, got red in the face and finally begged them to turn it off." There were no lasting effects.

In Los Angeles, Eldon Griffiths rode around with a 550-lb. lion for two days, then brought the beast to a TIME party. Polishing his fingernails on his coat, Griffiths said casually, "He's more afraid of me." After his "City in Terror"

story from Johannesburg, Correspondent Alexander Campbell was advised by another writer to buy himself "a nice bulletproof car."

Correspondent Fred Klein was the one who was repeatedly sprayed with perfume while working on a story on the French perfume industry. He wrote: "My friends refused to associate with me, claiming that I smelled like one of those gentlemen who parade the Champs-Elysees after dark." The correspondent who got strapped into a death chair (by a playful warden) was Serrell Hillman, in San Francisco. The warden made him promise the story would run in the magazine before releasing him.

Cordially yours,

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