Some of you may remember the Christmas card TIME sent out last year to those who had been given gift subscriptions: a string of colored cutouts representing 21 departments of the magazine. A collection of these cards now hangs in a small hospital ward in Korea. The man who hung them is Dr. Paul S. Crane, American surgeon and head of the Presbyterian Medical Center in Chonju.

Dr. Crane's collection began last February, when he received one of the cards announcing that his father, who lives in Gulf port, Miss., had given him a subscription to TIME. The doctor wrote, asking if he could have some more cards. Later he sent a letter of explanation and a picture of his reasons (see above).

When the first card arrived, wrote Dr. Crane, he decided to take it to the children's tuberculosis ward of his mission hospital. There, he strung the cutouts from a nail driven into one of the roughhewn beams of the wall. The decoration "was an instantaneous success," he reported. "The patients, all of them abandoned orphans and most of them under two years of age, were fascinated with the new toy as the nurses dangled it over the beds and cribs that fill the wood-floored ward . . . Now, with enough cards to string from one end of the room to the other, we have some added color and interest for our patients recovering from this prevalent disease. They may not get you too many subscriptions, but they sure brighten up the place."

On a trip to Chonju, TIME Correspondent James Greenfield visited Dr. Crane and reported on some of the work he is doing. Some of the children in his hospital are found wandering the city streets, abandoned by parents and relatives; some are simply dropped at the hospital's large, white wooden gates. A few weeks ago, the doctor found a baby who had been left on the seat of his parked jeep. The mission, built to accommodate 30 patients, now houses 150, of which 65 are homeless orphans.

A primary worry, the doctor admitted, is how to keep the hand laundry going fast enough to provide "what seems like a thousand clean diapers a day." The hospital operates on a meager budget of $6,000 a year, and the great need, says Dr. Crane, is toys. Toys of any kind--old, fancy or plain --for the youngsters who have seen so little color and happiness in the bare hills of southwest Korea.

One person who was particularly interested in Dr. Crane's letter is Dick Gangel, 34, head of TIME'S circulation art department, which designed the Christmas card. Gangel still has some war memories of his own. He was a World War II P-38 fighter pilot, with combat credits of three German Messerschmitts and one Junkers shot down. Dr. Crane's letter arrived at a period when most people here were thinking of blue skies and summer vacations. But in Gangel's department, there was the annual off-season mood of jingle bells and Santa Claus. Reason : his four-man staff was busy working on this year's Christmas card de signs for gift subscriptions to TIME Inc. magazines. To help the mood, Gangel had tacked sprigs of holly, some toy reindeer and a couple of pine cones above the drawing boards to divert his artists from thoughts of the latest baseball score, the nearest golf course, or caricatures of the boss.

By last week, however, everyone in the department was back in tune with the almanac. Final design and art for the new Christmas cards had been chosen, production started. The artists were working on posters and other current art, and looking forward to spending a normal Christmas in December.

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