Dear Time-Reader

The TIME reporter who has been covering one of the most famous vacations of 1953 is Ed Darby, our White House correspondent, assigned to report on President Eisenhower's vacation in Colorado. I asked Darby to tell us about his working holiday, and he sent me the following reply:

"The other day I obtained an exclusive interview with the President of the U.S. It is the first time since Dwight Eisenhower entered the White House that he has talked to an individual reporter. It happened because I had my golf clubs along this trip. The people at Denver's Cherry Hills Club are very nice to us reporters. The club has given us all guest cards which read: 'At the request of President Eisenhower, Cherry Hills Country Club is pleased to extend the privileges of the club.'

"Locker space is, of course, scarce. On this particular day, the club pro, Ralph ("Rip") Arnold, escorted me to the locker room and told me to shout for Granby, the locker attendant. I walked from the sunlight into the gloom of the locker room and sang out. About the third time I shouted, a quiet, pleasant voice said: 'Hi, Darby, you having a little trouble?'

"In the gloom, I had been standing about a pace from the President, almost shouting in his face. Colorado Governor Dan Thornton, who was playing with the President that day, found Granby for me while the President and I chatted. Or, rather, the President talked and I gulped, trying to think of just how you go about apologizing for shouting in the President's face. The President allowed that it was great weather, that the course was in fine shape and that his game was going pretty well ('I got a birdie on the first hole this morning'). It was not exactly a world-shaking interview, but it fitted into the week's story of a President on vacation."

The bits & pieces that go into making a week's story of a presidential vacation are harvested at odd moments and places during a long day. "Incidentally" says Darby, "it's now next to a duty to learn to play golf. One of our colleagues does not play, and he has appointed me his copyreader on all golf stories. He asked me to do the chore after he got into print with a sentence saying that the President had teed up for a drive from the green."

In Denver, the press is billeted at the Brown Palace Hotel. The main complaint, says Darby, is "the working hours that the President maintains." He gets to his Lowry air base office about 7:45 most mornings. "This means that reporters have to leave the hotel around 7 to check in at the base and catch the first visitors and business of the day."

After the President's usual two-hour morning stint at the office, during which reporters stand by to interview callers and get announcements of the morning work, they are free to tag along to the golf course. "But there are times when everything is quiet and the President is safely at home and the reporter can argue himself into taking a full afternoon off." In the evening, White House Press Secretary Jim Hagerty phones the press room at the Brown Palace to report on any afternoon event that is newsworthy.

On the side trips, says Darby, "tagging around after the President in long motorcades is enough to give the regular White House correspondent a nervous breakdown. A motorcade is something like the kid's game of cracking-the-whip.

Today, a dozen cars tagged John Zimmerman the President's big black DARBY Cadillac from Denver to

Fraser, 74 miles across the Rockies. The President's car buzzed along at 50 m.p.h., and out on the end of the whip, press cars speeded up to 65 and 70 to catch up after the hairpin turns."

With his nerves still twanging from the trip, Darby finished his note. He wrote: "I'm typing this in the waiting room of the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad depot, the typewriter on a chair beside a potbellied stove. The temperature is a cool 66DEG; a mile up a dusty gravel road, the President is enjoying some fishing. Western Union Morse circuits are tapping away in the next room on press stories and White House messages. I've bought some levis and heavy flannel shirts. I'm assured that a six-gun is not really necessary."

He added: "When I get home in mid-September and start my own vacation, my wife will have six months of work around the house for me to do in one week." After that, says Darby, he will probably play some golf.

Cordially yours,

James A. Linen

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