As a child in Cambridge, Mass., Martha Duffy used to satisfy her thirst for Mozart and Verdi by listening each Saturday afternoon to Texaco's Metropolitan Opera radio broadcast. She was usually well prepared. The previous week, she and her sister would borrow the score of the upcoming performance from the local library and, to her sister's piano accompaniment, sing the entire opera together. Other afternoons, she often went to Boston's Fenway Park where she bought a grandstand seat in leftfield. Duffy remembers: "I was a Red Sox fan, and my first crush was on Ted Williams."

For the past three years Martha Duffy has been able to pursue her disparate interests as senior editor in charge of TIME'S entertainment sections as well as Music and Sport. After editing this week's story on Charlie's Angels, she went to Carnegie Hall on four consecutive days to listen to the Berlin Philharmonic. She keeps up with the whole range of television programming by watching video tapes in her office and at home. Says she: "I just broke the dial on the small television in the kitchen by switching the channel so often."

An English major at Radcliffe College, Duffy joined TIME in 1960, and was a researcher and book reviewer for several years before becoming an editor. Literature is mostly an avocation now, but she retains a fondness for mystery novels and has thought of writing one. "TIME" she says with a grin, "would be the perfect setting."

Movie and TV Critic Richard Schickel wrote the story, based on reporting by Leo Janos and William F. Marmon Jr. in Los Angeles and Mary Cronin, Janice Castro and Jean Vallely in New York. As the Show Business/Television reporter-researcher, Vallely rivals Duffy in periodic movie marathons (up to four films in a day). But she recalls that as a child, "movies were only something for a rainy day. It wasn't healthy to spend so much time indoors." Instead, her family would often trek from their home in Falmouth, Me., to leftfield in Fenway Park to watch one of Vallely's first heroes: Ted Williams.

This week's NATION section opens with the work of an unusual photographic contributor to TIME: Jeff Carter, 24, who recorded some family relaxation with his father, the President-elect.

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