Dear TIME-Reader:

MY six-year-old son -- had his polio shot . . . and seven days later, he got sick," Mrs. R. M. Adams of Puenten, Calif, wrote to us. She added an hour-by-hour report on her son's symptoms and made a fervent appeal for advice about polio vaccine. "I'm writing to you because TIME is the only place we were able to get any good information." Other worried mothers, we have heard, were told by family physicians: "You can get as much information as I have by reading TIME's MEDICINE section." Last week at the American Medical Association convention in Atlantic City, many doctors buttonholed and commended the man most responsible for TIME's continued accurate coverage of Dr. Jonas E. Salk's vaccine. That man is Gilbert Cant, 45, TIME's MEDICINE editor for the past six years, a TIME writer and correspondent for five years before that. Writing the cover story on Dr. Salk (March 29, 1954) gave British-born Editor Cant a searching interest in the Salk vaccine. In recent months, he has been reporting week by week on the use of the vaccine, "calling the shots as I see them and narrowing down on the essentials." His most essential and informative story, Premature & Crippled, appears in this week's MEDICINE section.

WHEN TIME did its first cover on Labor Leader WALTER P. REUTHER (Dec. 3, 1945), the researcher on the story was Blanche Finn. Last week, as NATIONAL AFFAIRS Writer George de Carvalho wrote the second Reuther cover, his researcher also was Blanche Finn. In between, she worked on cover stories about the A.F.L.'s late President WILLIAM GREEN, the C.I.O.'s late President PHILIP MURRAY, the A.F.L.'s new President GEORGE MEANY, the Musicians' JAMES C. PETRILLO and the Maritime Union's JOE CURRAN, among others. As a result, she is on a first-name basis with most of the U.S.'s top labor leaders and has picked up a journeyman's knowledge of half a dozen trades.

Researcher Finn knew about unionism and unions before she came to TIME, twelve years ago. She learned in labor's own school of hard knocks. She handed out leaflets at the gates of industrial plants and once got roughed up on a picket line. David Dubinsky hired her as an organizer for his A.F.L. garment workers, and Sidney Hillman hired her away to write for his C.I.O. clothing workers' Advance.

For her research on TIME's last labor cover story about the A.F.L.'s Meany (March 21), former C.I.O.-A.F.L. Employee Finn received congratulations all around. Wrote a C.I.O. chieftain: "Nice work, kid, on that Meany piece . . ." Cordially yours,

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