Dear TIME-Reader:

A HANDSOME Westchester matron, chic in a Hattie Carnegie dress and fragrant with Patou's Moment Supreme, passed TIME Editor James C. Keogh in New York's Grand Central Terminal, humming: "Da-vy, Davy Crockett, King of the wild frontier!" In Beverly Hills, startled Furrier Al Teitelbaum told TIME Correspondent Ezra Goodman that a movie matron had handed him a mink stole and ordered it cut into "coonskin" caps for her two sons.

Other young Davy Crocketts in coonier coonskins around the U.S. have set off a resonant boom and what looks like the beginning of a free-for-all trademark squabble (see BUSINESS' The Wild Frontier) ONE sunny day last week a helicopter landed on the heliport atop the Sankei Kaikan, the daily newspaper Sangyo Keizai's building. Out stepped Edgar R. Baker, managing director of TIME'S international editions. Quickly, pretty Takarazuka girls presented him with a bouquet as thanks for TIME'S story about Takarazuka (in Music, Jan. 3), the city whose principal industry is innocent merriment.

Baker's arrival was timed for the formal opening of our new offices in the Sankei Kaikan. These quarters are in sharp contrast to our first home in bombed-out postwar Tokyo. Hard on the heels of General MacArthur, TIME moved into the Japanese capital, set up shop in backrooms above the Kyo-bunkwan bookstore and published its pony-size, adless Far Eastern edition. Last week some 400 Japanese and foreigners came to see our new quarters, and to sip, among other drinks, such an inscrutable concoction as the "Monkey Gland" (gin, orange juice, D.O.M. and grenadine).

During his visit, Managing Director Baker announced that TIME is ready to help organize a 1956 Asian investment conference along the lines of the highly successful inter-American meetings we co-sponsored in New Orleans early this year.

FOR this week's cover story on Prime Minister Anthony Eden and the British general election campaign, half a dozen TIME correspondents took to the hustings in pursuit of Tory, Labor and Liberal candidates of all ranks. In Scotland to cover Nye Bevan's tour, the London bureau's Robert Lubar wondered how the Laborite rebel would like being shadowed by a U.S. newsman. As it turned out, Bevan liked it fine. He began by taking Lubar to task for what he said was TIME'S rough treatment of him. "But you thrive on it," Lubar remarked. Bevan snorted and replied: "If you administer strychnine to a man over a number of years, the fact that he survives is no credit to you. You don't call it humanitarian!"

With that, Bevan guffawed and took Lubar into his official party. When asked what he would talk about at a rally one night, Bevan nodded toward Lubar and rumbled: "Ask him."

Cordially yours,

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