To answer some of the questions our subscribers have been asking about how TIME gathers, verifies, writes and distributes its news

Judging by our mail since last week's issue, hardly anybody missed the story way back on page 77 about how the Army is building our new highway to Alaska.

Everybody wants to know how we found out so much--where we heard about the mosquito that landed on the airport and had 85 gallons of gasoline pumped into it before they found it wasn't a bomber --how we knew about the fresh-baked cakes a lady at Charlie's Lake gave the woodsmen when they came in so tired they could hardly drag themselves home.

That story of war against the wilderness had never appeared anywhere else, and it could not have been printed in TIME if Bill Rowland, head of our editorial office in far-off Atlanta, Georgia, had not spent two weeks bush-flying and foot-slogging all over Jack London's Yukon territory to get us the information first hand.

Rowland was in western Canada on a working vacation--mountain climbing, fishing, covering the chuckwagon races at the Calgary Stampede in Alberta for us (TIME, July 27). Everybody up there was talking about the highway, but most of it was rumor and guesswork. Bill, a newsman from way back, smelled an important story that needed telling--wired how-about-it home to TIME, got his green light and vanished into the North on what he says was the toughest, most soul-satisfying news trip he had ever taken.

He traveled with a carload of "dirt stiffs" on a narrow-gauge railroad that climbs 3,000 feet in 17 miles--he slept on the frozen ground with a regiment of Negro engineers--he punched at black flies, horse flies, deer flies, no-see-ums--got caked with mud and half frozen. He flew with Bush Flyer Les Cook at treetop level over hundreds of miles of howling wilderness--and with famed Polar Flyer Collie Kenyon through hours and hours of blinding forest fire smoke.

The planes plumped him down on lakes which probably had never seen a dozen white men, and then jerked him up again over mountains no white man had ever crossed on foot. (Once, deep inland over a trackless waste of frozen mountains, he asked "What do you do if the motor pops?" The pilot grinned, "Oh, they'd find us next year when the snow goes out.")

When those two weeks were over, Bill had flown more than 4,000 miles --had bounced and skidded his way in trucks and jeeps 400 more miles--walked his feet sore, sunk knee-deep in muskeg, sung "Squaws Along the Yukon" in the midnight subArctic twilight--talked with every kind of worker along the whole route of the Alaska Highway. He came out of the wilderness so dirty and smelly that even the waitress in a Fort St. John hash house turned up her nose--but he had a story to tell of American resourcefulness and courage that the whole nation can well be proud of.

Bill Rowland began his news-hunting career right after Princeton when he went to work for the Nashville Tennessean, covered the monkey trial at Dayton, Tenn., wrote the first story printed in any newspaper about Floyd Collins, trapped in a rocky, coffin-like corridor deep in a Kentucky cave. His next job was with the Atlanta Journal, at the desk next to a smart little redhead named Margaret Mitchell. He did a stint on the copy desk of the New York News, was Managing Editor of the Tennessean, News Editor of the Nashville Banner, instructor of journalism at George Peabody College. He started to work for TIME in 1934, has followed the news for us all the way from Key West to Alaska. I wish we could find a lot more like him.

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