Dear Time-Reader

The change of diet has been a bit too strenuous for our young son Jerry and he has been eating some of the baby's food by way of relief. Therefore, her supplies are diminishing alarmingly. I am most anxious for the baby's food to get off right away. If she had to go a day without the right food, we would all end up in the insane asylum. She is an angel with a temper that pierces eardrums, raises roofs, blasts buildings.

This plea from a harassed mother, the wife of one of our Paris Bureau correspondents, is old stuff to J. David Buckner, prime mover of TIME-LIFE International's Personal Shopping Service. During the war our foreign correspondents were pretty much on their own (thanks to outfits like U.S. Army Exchange Service) and needed few supplies from home. The postwar exodus of their wives & children (and of the wives & children of our other overseas personnel as well) to join them abroad changed all that. They needed all sorts of goods & services, most of which were in short supply throughout the world, and TLI had to set up a global shopping service to provide them.

To date, Personal Shopping (which operates solely for the benefit of TLI bureaumen) has been a constantly expanding service, and Buckner, who has to purchase many of the "rush" items himself, is now quite at home in the unmentionables departments of Manhattan's stores. He has had orders for almost everything, from washable dolls with eyes that open & close to automobile jack assemblies and girdles. The one constant in his business, however, is the three most requested items from all of TLI's bureaus throughout the world: cigarets, coffee, vitamin pills.

Babies' diapers are Buckner's principal headache. Hard to get abroad (Parisian infants have to be shored up with newspapers), they are hard to get in the U.S. too--as many of you undoubtedly know. Buckner is accustomed to receiving frantic notes from expectant TLI mothers announcing wistfully: "I will expect the diapers when I see them!" He is generally able to assure them that the diapers will be there ahead of the baby.

There are standard requests, of course, for all kinds of cosmetics, razor blades, toilet articles, radios, books ("I'm starved to death for up-to-date Stateside reading"), and there are special ones like the following:

"Many thanks for the ice cube trays. They arrived in good shape. Now, I want to get a pair of shoes for our bureau's faithful chauffeur. I am enclosing the outline of his foot without shoes on. . . ."

Buckner had quite a time getting shoes to fit the diagram. With it he tramped from shoe store to shoe store without success. Some salesmen thought him a bit balmy. Eventually he found the right fit. The salesman wanted to know what kind of man ordered shoes that way. Buckner told him and the salesman muttered: "Didn't know Frenchmen had such wide feet."

Food is in short supply in most countries, too, and Buekner dispatches 200 food packages to the overseas bureaus each month. The one worry he does not have is fretting his purchases through customs at the other end. Russian customs officials, for instance, once levied 3,600 roubles ($300) on some stationery that TLI's Moscow bureau chief had ordered. It took endless dickering to get the stationery released at a sensible fee.

Of all the requests he has satisfied, one stands out vividly in Buckner's memory. It was a London bureau man's Christmas present to an English family. They dearly wanted eight pounds of knitting wool (two pounds each of three-ply Navy, grey, dark green and red) with two sets of knitting needles for a young Dutch girl who tends the grave of their son, an R.A.F. pilot shot down by the Luftwaffe over Holland. They had asked her what she wanted most, and she had answered: yarn.

Cordially,

James A. Linen

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