You may recall that several weeks ago I told you about TIME'S Mexico City bureau's man-of-all-work, whose kind is familiar to journalists every where and whose valuable know-how makes him -- in many ways -- journalism's indispensable man. He has opposite numbers in TIME'S other bureaus overseas.

Few of our Paris bureau correspondents would care to leave on a cross country assignment without Joseph ("Pepi") Martis, 36, a walking atlas of the crossroads, small towns, languages, dialects, customs & counter-customs from Lisbon to the Russian border. He is also a whiz at figuring out good camera angles.

A small, lean, nervous, friendly Viennese, Pepi, who is a former automobile mechanic and French Foreign Legionnaire, was, for ten years, handy man to a U.S. business man who insisted that Pepi be able to play tennis with his guests, cook dinner, serve it, and, after dinner, sit in as a fourth at bridge. Pepi's duties for the Paris bureau are just as varied, and he can generally be counted on to deliver in style -- as he did last summer when, drafted at the last moment to play baseball (a game he had viewed only once), he rapped out two home runs for the bureau team.

In their fashion, Pepi's counterparts in London (Hugh Shaw), Rio de Janeiro (Jose Gallo), Cairo (Abdel Basset El Taher) and Shanghai (the three Wongs) are equally adept. Shaw, a small, taciturn, greying Englishman whose way with automobiles approaches genius, will be long remembered by the squads of photographers he maneuvered through London's blazing streets for vantage shots of the blitz. Gallo is a politically indispensable young man who has somehow made himself welcome at the headquarters of all of Brazil's political parties. Abdel, an Upper Egypt man with the Egyptians' fine feeling for humor and sense of the ridiculous, is master of the endless minutiae of publishing and distributing TIME abroad.

The Tokyo bureau's Man Friday is an experienced young journalist named George Trevor Wykeham Gauntlett, a half-English, half-Japanese native of Japan, descended from the Earls of Wykeham and from the "First Samurai" of the Nagoya area. His father, the son of a canon of the Church of England, introduced the pipe organ and shorthand into Japan; his mother, one of Japan's leading Christians, woman suffragists and peace advocates and the first Japanese woman to own and ride a bicycle, was Japan's woman delegate to the League of Nations, The Hague Convention and the Washington disarmament talks. They were interned at Karuizawa during the war.

In Japan, where language difficulties and other barriers make the correspondent's job one of the most difficult anywhere, it would be virtually impossible to do your work without a Gauntlett at your elbow. Thanks to his unique lineage, his experience as a reporter in Japan, and his contacts, Gauntlett is, as his bureau chief says, "the hub of TIME'S Tokyo bureau."

His opposite number in the New Delhi bureau -- and by all odds the most dignified gentleman in TIME'S employ -- is Mohammed Aziz Khan, 54, an elegant, respected, land-owning member DEGf the Northern Punjab's martial Quereshi tribe. In a land not noted for rapidity, Aziz has a way of speeding incoming & out going cables and of making Delhi's temperamental telephone system work. Further more, he knows India like a book. Asked how he liked working for an American publication, he replied with characteristic solemnity: "I have worked for many American sahibs, but I have never worked for an American sahib who sends and receives so many telegrams."

Cordially,

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