A recent note from TIME Correspondent Harvey Rosenhouse in Guatemala City began: "Shortly before the battle for Guatemala broke out, I arrived home one evening to learn that a guardia judicial (secret policeman) had waded through my muddy street that day to question my wife Ruth about my activities. He had passed it off by calling it just a 'routine call.' However, a friend I knew in the government phoned me soon after, and asked me to call him immediately on another phone. I did and he explained that my home phone was tapped by the police. that I should be careful to whom I talked.

"Two evenings later I went to call on a government official who lives on a hill at the end of a lonely dirt road not far from the Aurora airport. He spoke frankly about local politics, and agreed that President Arbenz's political future was not too bright. About midnight, the phone rang. It was a crony saying that the city's lights had gone out. As he spoke, the lights dimmed in our house, then went out. The night was pitch black. It was Guatemala's first apagoOn (blackout). Said my friend: 'Perhaps the thing we were talking about has begun.' "

The thing that they had been talking about was possible revolt against the Arbenz regime. Reporter Rosenhouse was collecting material for the cover story scheduled that week on President Arbenz (TIME. June 28). At the time the revolt began. TIME Bureau Chief Bob Lubar was on his way to Honduras from Mexico City to cover the rebel forces, and three part-time correspondents had been alerted to help cover the Arbenz story: Robert Clark in San Salvador, Nick Agurcia in Tegucigalpa, and Henry Wallace from Havana, who was in Honduras reporting the United Fruit Co. strike.

On the morning of the second day of the revolt, said Rosenhouse, "We were up bright and early to cope with the greatest problem of all: how to file to New York through the tightest censorship ever in effect in Guatemala. A week before, a courier had sent the story from San Salvador. But now no planes were flying."

Meanwhile, New York, fully aware of the censorship problem, was waiting for the story. A little after 6 o'clock that Saturday evening, Clara Applegate, in TIME'S Foreign News Bureau in New York, answered her phone. It was Rosenhouse on the line. A sympathetic censor had allowed his call to go through, and for the next four hours Rosenhouse dictated his story. "The same censor," said Rosenhouse, "began to help other correspondents, but he got careless. The police caught him, beat him with rubber hoses, shot him in the leg three times and fractured his skull. He is now recovering in the military hospital. When censorship ended, it was hard to believe. Suddenly newsmen could devote some time to reporting instead of waging their own war with the censors." Rosenhouse, a native of Chicago and a graduate of U.C.L.A., was first introduced to hotheaded political action in the summer of 1940. He was in Mexico City when a crowd celebrating Independence Day began to riot. A policeman picked up a chunk of ice, heaved " , it into the crowd. The ice struck Rosenhouse on the head, and when he came to, a big Texan was mopping his face.

The Texan offered him a job on the now defunct English-language paper, The Daily Record. "But," says Rosen-house, "payday just never came." Rosen-house soon left to work on Mexico City's Daily Bulletin, later married a Guatemalan girl, Ruth Garcia Granados.

After a hitch in the U.S. Army.

Rosenhouse took a job in Guatemala City managing a radio station owned by his father-in-law, who was preparing to run for President in the 1950 general elections. Says Rosenhouse: "On July 18. 1949, the day after we arrived, a bloody but abortive revolution broke out following the political assassination of Colonel Arana." Shootings became commonplace during the height of the tourist season, and Rosenhouse saw most of them--"from the underside safety of park benches." Rosenhouse became a part-time correspondent for TIME in 1951, and almost immediately had censorship trouble when all constitutional guarantees were suspended after a July riot.

Since last October, Rosenhouse has been TIME'S bureau chief in Guatemala, covering Central America. In his spare time Rosenhouse enjoys sailing on Lake Amatitlaan, near Guatemala City, where "there are two obstacles to beware of: hidden rocks, and the bodies of unsuccessful politicians." Cordially yours,

James A. Linen

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