One January day (clear in Manhattan, foggy in Los Angeles) a group of TIME editors, writers and reporters made the first plans for the cover story that appears in this issue. The reporting assignment was handed to Frank McCulloch, who was about to take over as chief of TIME's Los Angeles bureau. It was a Los Angeles-sized assignment: report, in words and pictures, the phenomenal industrial and human growth that in less than a century had turned a patch of sand in Southern California into the greatest megalopolis in the U.S.

For the picture side of the story, McCulloch called in Los Angeles Photographer John Bryson, onetime LIFE correspondent. Cameraman Bryson took a twelve-hour, high-altitude aircrew course and a high-altitude chamber test to prepare for aerial shots, and set up an elaborate weather-warning system so he would get the word as soon as a rare clear day began to dawn. For three months Bryson matched guesses with the Weather Bureau, peered disconsolately through smog, cruised 1,668 miles by car, flew uncounted thousands of miles more in prop planes, jets and helicopters (at times dangling out of the belly of the helicopter to get low aerial shots). In Southern California, he soon discovered, it is hard to find a camera angle that does not include a top-secret defense installation. "Every time I set up that long lens," he said, "it seemed that a dozen security agents would come swarming out of the bushes and want to know what I thought I was doing."

Meanwhile, McCulloch was poring over official tracts, planning-commission documents and sociologists' reports, and roaming more than 3,000 miles over the sprawling city in pursuit of more than 50 interviews. To get firsthand views of the operation, Associate Editor Alvin M. Josephy Jr., in charge of the picture project, and Contributing Editor Jesse L. Birnbaum, writer of this week's story, flew to California and joined the air and ground forces.

As Correspondent McCulloch began to pour his 30,000-word file into Manhattan, Cover Subject Norman Chandler (a handy man with words himself) asked with a grin: "If you give your editors everything you've got, how many issues of the magazine is it going to take to carry it all?" For the story that carries the sense of it all, see NATIONAL AFFAIRS, The New World.

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