TIME'S masthead this week lists 41 full-time correspondents in the U.S. and Canadian news bureaus and 35 in foreign bureaus located throughout the world. But to cover the news of the world each week, TIME also requires the part-time services of many other newsmen. These are TIME'S part-time or stringer correspondents. There are now 160 part-time correspondents for TIME in the U.S. and Canada, plus 112 overseas--experienced reporters in their own communities who watch for and report news of more than local interest.

Some stringer correspondents eventually become regular TIME staff members. There are now ten staff members in New York and 14 correspondents in bureaus in the U.S. and abroad who got their early TIME training as part-time correspondents.

The newest stringer to join the masthead roster of full-time correspondents is Frank McCulloch of Reno. McCulloch is a Westerner who knows his West. He was born on a hay and cattle ranch, near Fernley, Nev., 33 years ago. Extracurricular grammar-school activity, he says, "consisted of fighting daily with a Mexican boy named Jesse Arenaz, and, in eight years of furious effort, never winning a scrap."

At the age of ten, he got a shotgun for a present and went hunting out of season. Result: "A bag of three cock pheasants which caused consternation because father was a game warden." Other early indiscretions, McCulloch reports, helped influence his present appearance. Among his friends were a tribe of Paiute Indians on a reservation nearby. When he was disobedient, he was punished by Chief Harry Winnemucca, whose method of discipline was to pick up the offender by the ears. "As a result of this treatment," says McCulloch, "both ears now have a tendency to flap."

McCulloch began his newspaper career as a part-time reporter for the Reno Gazette while attending the University of Nevada. After graduating in 1941, he went to work in San Francisco for the United Press, later in Woodland, Calif, as reporter for the

Democrat. After a three-year hitch in the Marine Corps (reaching the rank of sergeant), he returned to report for the Reno Gazette and double as staff correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle.

McCulloch signed on as a TIME stringer in 1951. One of his memories of those days is a hard-luck story with a happy ending. He had suggested that TIME do a story on Reno's famed Harold's Club as a successful business enterprise. The editors thought it was a good idea, told him to go ahead. When his research was almost completed, McCulloch was taken to the hospital for a midnight emergency appendectomy. By coincidence, TIME'S San Francisco Bureau Chief Al Wright arrived in Reno the next day, learned that McCulloch was temporarily out of action, and picked up the urgent wire queries at Western Union. Says McCulloch: "When Wright arrived at the hospital to find out who he should see at the club, I was riding a Nembutal-generated, pink-hued cloud.

I thought for a moment and replied, 'Try a guy by the name of Barron Beshoar' " -- who is one of TIME'S news deskmen in New York.

With this misinformation, off to the club went Wright, where he located his man (whose name was Smith), picked up the last details of the story and wired the copy to Beshoar. Later the club's boss, Raymond I. Smith, a hard-bitten New Englander with a sharp eye for a fact, described the story (TIME, May 11) as "the only really accurate piece ever written about the place."

A year after McCulloch became a stringer, he moved into the editor-manager chair of the Nevada State News, a tough, outspoken weekly published in Reno. He continued to report as a stringer for TIME, until he was asked to become a full-time correspondent. McCulloch is now stationed in Los Angeles, a member of TIME'S bureau reporting the news from that part of the U.S.

Cordially yours,

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