By last week, the people in TIME'S Education Department were desk-high in a familiar midwinter task: recording the results of another of TIME'S annual Current Affairs Contests for high-school and college students. The department was busy checking the winners in each school class and noting the choice in prizes. The student who scored highest in his class on the 105-question quiz had the choice of a book, a world globe or an inscribed bronze medal.

The student tests, on which the Contests are based, are similar to the TIME News Quizzes which appear in the magazine. The Contest itself was first tried as an experiment in 18 preparatory schools in 1936. (A sample question 'on National Affairs was this: "The soldiers' bonus will be paid June 15 in: 'printing press' money--silver certificates--Baby Bonds--gold--long-term bonds." The answer: Baby Bonds.)

The very next year, the Contest was expanded to include additional schools and colleges, and it has become an annual event with more and more schools and students participating each year. This winter, on the 18th anniversary of our first Current Affairs Contest, I thought it might be interesting to check some of those original schools to see what our first winners are doing now.

The 1936 winner in St. Mark's School (Southboro, Mass.) was La-Rue Robbins Lutkins, who went on to graduate from Yale as a Phi Beta Kappa with honors in history. He joined the Foreign Service of the State Department as vice consul in Havana in 1942 (during the war served with the OSS in Africa), was then transferred to Peking, China in 1946. He is now with the American Embassy in Tokyo.

Winner at St. Margaret's School (Waterbury, Conn.) was Elizabeth H. Jones, later an art major at Vassar, now head of the Conservation Department of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University. At the

Fessenden School (West Newton, Mass.), it was Horace Morison Jr., now a sales agent in New York for Pan American World Airways.

Lawrenceville School in New Jersey had double winners: Donald M. Ehrman, now a clinical psychologist in Palo Alto, Calif., and Malcolm S. Forbes, who later published two Ohio newspapers, became associate publisher of the B. C. Forbes & Sons Publish ing Co., N.Y., New Jersey state senator, and in 1953 unsuccessful candidate for the Republican gubernatorial nomination.

In its winner, Groton School provided Harvard with its present Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences: McGeorge Bundy, graduate of Yale and co-author of the late Henry L. Stimson's memoirs and editor of The Pattern of Responsibility, a book on the government career of former Secretary of State Dean Acheson.

The legal field is also represented: Deerfield Academy's Louis F. Eaton Jr. is now with a law firm in Boston; Kent School's George W. Overton with a firm in Chicago, and Choate School's Richard Young, son of Owen D. Young, is a well-known international lawyer and one of the editors of the American Journal of International Law.

There are also two bankers. Wil liam Shacklette Ray, Loomis School, is in the credit department of the First National Bank of Memphis, Tenn. And William Elliot Vauclain, of Haverford School, is now an assistant trust investment officer for the Fidelity-Philadelphia Trust Co., in Philadelphia, Pa.

In the interval of 18 years since pupils in 1 8 schools first competed in the Contest, some 2,500,000 more students have followed their example. In the most recent Contest, this was the lineup: 100,000 students from 1,250 schools and colleges throughout the U.S. and Canada.

Cordially yours,

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.