In TIME'S overseas bureaus a correspondent's best friend is often the staff driver. The drivers are local citizens, familiar with the traffic laws, geography and driving habits of the land. But they do more than just drive cars. They are indispensable members of the staff. They run errands and act as interpreters. They get dispatches out over impossible telephone connections. They place airmail packages on planes whose manifests are already made up. In short, they are minor miracle workers.

The staff driver in Berlin is 52-year-old Fritz Bense, who started to work with TIME almost nine years ago, has since logged some 300,000 miles and has worked his way through seven staff cars without an accident. He is a particularly prudent driver, says Bureau Chief Frank White, while traveling in Berlin's Red-occupied East sector, where Germans who are caught violating traffic laws have a way of disappearing. For the heavy-traveling Bonn bureau there are three drivers: Wilhelm Hauner, former chauffeur of a Tiger tank in a German Panzer divi sion ; Heinz Koperski, who served in an 88mm. artillery battery; and Bruno Teschke, who serviced Messerschmitts in Czechoslovakia. All have one thing in common: in World War II each was captured by the Russians and held as a prisoner of war.

Driving for the peripatetic TIME correspondents guarantees a variety of experiences. Frank Allen, driver in the London bureau, remembers, for example, a recent trip to Chartwell, home of Sir Winston Churchill. Allen had tucked a copy of the Prime Minister's book, The Gathering Storm, under his arm on the offchance of getting it autographed. As he waited, an aide noticed the book, said to Allen. "The old man's in a bad mood today. I don't think you have much of a chance." However, as Allen and his passengers were about to leave, Sir Winston turned to Allen and grumbled in a gruff voice, "D'you want me to sign that?" Allen smiled, nodded and got his autograph.

On one occasion Allen was responsible for keeping a TIME editor out of jail. The man was Senior Editor John Osborne, who was passing through London returning from the Far East. Says Osborne: "Unthinkingly and stupidly, I left London Airport for the Savoy without permission or visa, and the immigration and customs officials were in a splendid rage when Allen brought me back. His good offices and honest English face did more than my arguments to allay the quite serious threat of jail thrown at me by the officials."

TIME'S Hong Kong driver is Chang Yu-cheng, 35, who began learning auto mechanics as an apprentice in Shanghai at the age of 15. He considers Hong Kong, with its well-enforced traffic regulations, a much easier place to drive in than Shanghai, with its ped-icab-ricksha-clogged streets. On the other hand, Tokyo traffic, reports Bureau Chief Dwight Martin, is without doubt the most reckless, dangerous and completely unpredictable of any major city in the world. The special peril, he adds, are the taxis -- darting, speeding little engines of destruction. The man who braves these haz ards for TIME is 25-year-old Shoichi Imai, who knows the fastest possible routes between the TIME office, the international airport and the military airfields surrounding the city.

In the Paris bureau there are two drivers, Lucien Hamoniaux and Joseph ("Pepi") Martis. Hamoniaux began his driving career as a racer, gave it up for the more comfortable job of chauffeuring. Pepi is a Vienna-born jack-of-all-trades. His particular specialty: arguing with customs officials in four languages. Before his wartime hitch in the French Foreign Legion he worked ten years as a handyman for an American living in Europe. He was expected to play tennis with guests, cook dinner, serve it, and after dinner sit in as a fourth at bridge. Although he had seen the game only once, he was recently called in to hit on the TIME bureau's baseball team. He rapped out two homers.

The Rome bureau has three drivers. Senior man is 6 1 -year-old Roberto Papini, who lived in the U. S. for a while after World War I, saved the money he made as an auto mechanic in Brooklyn, bought a car and toured the country. Now nearing retirement age, Papini has one ambition: to take his 17-year-old son Alberto on a similar tour of the U. S.

Cordially yours,

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