Keeping up with the travels of TIME'S staff is a round-the-clock job for the transportation experts in TIME'S Travel Bureau. Each month the department buys the transportation and handles all the details for some 1,500 "legs" of trips. A "leg" may be anything from a New York-Washington flight to arranging (at the peak of the tourist season) passage for Correspondent Thomas Dozier and family on a ship from New York to Spain, where he is to take over this month as Madrid bureau chief.

Getting tickets and reservations to match tight working schedules is only part of the job. Old passports have to be renewed, new ones obtained, visas and drivers' licenses procured on fast notice. Other duties of the Travel Bureau range from shipping automobiles and camera equipment to arranging for accident insurance and medical exams before the travelers take off. At times the bureau acts as a detective agency to locate a far-flown correspondent who has to be reached in a hurry.

At this time of the year, the Travel Bureau's work hits its annual peak--for it also lends a helping hand to TIME-Incers leaving on long U.S. vacation trips. Sometimes a trip is a combination of business and pleasure. An example is the trip which the bureau recently organized for TIME Lecturer John Scott. With his wife and daughter, he left for a 14-week tour of 14 European and Middle Eastern countries to gather new material for his talks. Among other things, the bureau had to get 21 separate visas by the time the Scotts' plane left.

Filling transportation requests, either coast-to-coast trips or round-the-world flights, are usually routine matters, thanks to the help of the traffic representatives of the airlines, railroads and steamship companies. Occasionally, however, the bureau gets a surprise request. One of the most unusual came from a TIME executive planning an out-of-town convention who asked for a theater car on the train that was to carry the delegates. No one in Travel had ever heard of a theater car; neither had the railroads. The man who made the request explained that it was a car equipped with theater seats, in which meetings could be held en route. Finally, someone in the Pullman Co. remembered that at one time they had equipped a theater car for a convention. It hadn't been used for 25 years.

There is also the matter of tracing wayward luggage and sometimes replacing lost tickets. There was the case of two travelers, for instance, who had to get new tickets midway through a business trip. They had stopped to enjoy some duck hunting, got caught in a downpour and their tickets had disintegrated. Another traveler sheepishly explained why he needed another set of tickets: he had left the first set in his shirt pocket, tossed the shirt into the washing machine.

Manager of TIME'S Travel Bureau is Joellen Snow, who has four assistants to help her with foreign and domestic travel orders. Penny Keefe, whose father was a civil engineer and introduced her to the rigors of travel at an early age, handles the foreign requests. The three girls who work on domestic travel are Lucretia Tate, a onetime Eastern Air Lines representative ; Elaine Goloven, who worked with Eastern before joining the travel department of a British company; and Frances Stubbs, who learned the job starting as a bookkeeper in the Travel Bureau.

Travel Manager J. Snow, who was born in Plum Bayou, Ark., decided that she wanted to make the Broadway theater her career after attending Northwestern University. She arrived in New York, got a night job as a reservations clerk with the Pennsylvania Railroad, and made the rounds of the casting offices during the day. As the lure of the theater lessened, Joellen continued her travel jobs: from the Pennsylvania to Trans World Airlines to the Seaboard Railroad, before coming to TIME in 1949.

And now, says Joellen, her own travel plans do not go beyond "96 acres and a brook." She and her writer-husband have bought the land, plan to build a house on it and stay put. Says she: "I don't even like to go to parties any more. All anyone talks about is his trips."

Cordially yours,

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