DearTIME-Reader:

IN their work space in the Exhibition Hall of Chicago's Conrad Hilton Hotel, TIME reporters pecked urgently at typewriters from early till late last week, while wire-service tickers clicked, Teletypes clattered and telephones jangled. This was our communications center for the Democratic Convention. Before the week was out, a similar center went into operation in San Francisco's Mark Hopkins, to forward preliminary stories on the Republican Convention. From the two centers will flow some half million words to help our editors not only report but illuminate the news of the conventions.

Communications Manager Garry E. Osborne began to plan these centers early in January, had the necessary equipment, e.g., telephone switchboards, extensions, tickers and Teletypes, on order before the month ended. As soon as work space was allotted for the conventions, he blueprinted the areas to designate and locate the type and position of equipment to be installed, then prepared a booklet for staff members, showing exactly where these nerve ends of our special communications network would be in each convention city.

For Osborne, communications are both occupation and preoccupation. He started in the business as a boy, delivering Postal telegrams at 1-c- a message in New York City. When the U.S. entered World War I he was a radio ham, tapping out Morse code on his do-it-yourself set. The National Guard quickly shipped him off to Old Point Comfort, Va. to help start a military radio school. Later, he threaded his way upward through the postwar mergers of telegraph and telephone companies. By 1951, just before he joined TIME, he was an operations and personnel executive for Western Union.

At TIME Inc., Osborne runs the Telephone Room and the Wire Room, both 16-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week operations. On a busy day, the switchboard and its 23 telephone operators -all, it seems, experts at tracking down staffers or newsworthy figures anywhere in the world - handle 25,000 calls. In the Wire Room, Teletype circuits interconnect all our U.S. and Canadian news bureaus, and a radio Teletype service gives instant contact with London, Paris, Bonn, The Hague, Rome and, soon, Tokyo. The Teletype systems add up to the most extensive private network in the magazine publishing field. "Its main feature is the speed with which we can get in contact with our bureaus. It's like bringing a worldwide organization into one office," says Osborne.

And it handles each week nearly 1,000,000 words. In addition, we receive daily budgets of some 650,000 words from major news agencies.

"I get the greatest kick out of this job. I can live with it," Osborne says. "Any time I can beat a communications problem, I'm happy."

Cordially yours,

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