The lady worrying her pet aspidistra through the subway at Manhattan's Rockefeller Center a few weeks ago may or may not have been headed for TIME INC.'S sixth annual Country Fair. Chances are, however, that she was--for at that time many members of our organization were lugging their entries in this event to the reception room of the TIME & LIFE Building.

Obviously, the center of New York City is probably the least likely place in the U.S. to hold a country fair. Nevertheless, we began ours the autumn after Pearl Harbor because so many of our members.had taken to raising Victory Gardens and wanted to compare their produce with that of coworkers, while others thought the fair would be a fine vehicle for exhibiting their spare-time capacities for painting, cooking, canning, photography, handicraft, and associated arts. The first fair was warmly received, and the succeeding ones have been no less so.

Livestock being a considerable problem even for the professional stock-yardmen of New York City, we allowed our Aberdeen Angus raisers and others to submit their entries by photograph, at first. This year, for the first time, the fair committee took a deep breath, announced a Livestock class, and settled back to await developments. They were small: only a saturnine pair of praying mantises and a young snail were entered.

The only other disappointing class in this year's fair was the fruit, flower and vegetable exhibit. No fruit turned up at all, and there were few vegetables beyond a lonely eggplant or two. Nor was there an immediately apparent reason for this sudden decline except, perhaps, the unreasonably hot weather the East has endured all summer or the possibility that, commodity prices being what they are, the contestants had been forced to eat their produce.

In all other categories the fair flourished. There were 216 exhibits, and their quality was better this year than ever before. This was especially true in the painting division. Jewelry, Knitting, Needlework and Sculpture also produced some arresting results, as did the Baked Goods division. There, considerable concern was felt for the judges who had to sample cake, pies, mustard, canned fish & game, preserves, cheesecake etc. beginning at 10 o'clock in the morning. This concern, however, found no echo among the spectators -- an entire exhibit of brownies and Toll House cookies disappeared under unexplained circumstances shortly after the reception room doors were opened at noon.

Eyebrows were raised at the award of two of the three grand prizes to members of the Country Fair committee, for the winners didn't even know they were competing. One went to TIME Production's Bert Chapman for the attractive authenticity of the fair's turkey-in-the-straw decor; another to TIME Promotion's art director, Fritz Brosius, for the poster herewith reproduced.

Neither these winners nor the entire decorating committee realized until the last minute, however, that the atmospheric bales of hay they had supplied needed to be fireproofed. This oversight, pointed out by Building Department inspectors, was promptly rectified.

To those of you who happened to drop into our reception room and see the fair and to scores of casual passers-by as well, TIME feels that the above explanation is overdue. We are also especially pleased at the reaction of two of our visitors: one, an advertising executive, was so taken with the painting exhibits that she offered to buy six of them on the spot for her private collection; the other, a Philadelphia merchant, made minute inquiries into the workings of the fair, saying he planned to try it next year in his own department store.

Cordially,

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