ALTHEA GIBSON does not belong to the clubs that will run the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association matches in Forest Hills next week, but the tournament is her big chance. The lanky Negro girl, who went from paddle tennis in Harlem to victory at Wimbledon (and is this week's TIME cover subject), is by all odds the leading contender. Shy by nature, wary of her turbulent success, the champ was a closemouthed subject for Reporter Serrell Hillman, dropped her guard only when Hillman spent a week at her side, trailed her to Chicago for the Clay Courts championship and scoured the suburbs for a supply of the pure honey she takes for prematch energy. Althea eventually gave Hillman the inside story of the life and hard times of a Negro tennis champion. See SPORT, That Gibson Girl.

ON vacation from the Kansas City (Mo.) Star, TIME'S Stringer Fred Kiewit, 35. checked in at TIME'S Chicago Bureau and went to work on reports that the nation's 248 major fraternal orders (125.861 chapters; assets: $10 billion), once the strongholds of U.S. good-fellowship and male society, have suffered a disheartening drop in prestige and attendance. Himself a sometime member of the Masons' DeMolay. Reporter Kiewit core-sampled the fraternal orders in the Midwest, from Elks to Moose to Knights of Pythias. Taking off from the hub of Chicago, TIME queried eight other stringers and correspondents, found a story of a major shift in U.S. social patterns. See NATIONAL AFFAIRS, Apathy on Lodge Night.

FOR 75 million working Americans now supporting Social Security with payroll taxes, there is no more important question than: "Will the money be there to pay me when I retire?" The unhappy fact is that the Social Security system is running in the red. For how this happened and what must be done, see BUSINESS, Social Security.

NOT all the big news crackles out of Washington into headlines; sometimes it comes more quietly, between the hard covers of an important book. This week TIME appraises Political Scientist Henry A. Kissinger's Nuclear Weapons arid Foreign Policy, a hard-hitting independent audit of the U.S.-Communist struggle. Scholar Kissinger presents a provocative array of ideas on U.S. diplomatic and military policy. See NATIONAL AFFAIRS, The Cold War & the Small War.

IN the nation's press, the Confidential trial in Los Angeles last week opened the shutters for a display of undressed pictures and well-fleshed tales about the stars. Many of the stories that blew up newspaper headlines had run in the scandalmags long ago, but the trial also began to pry loose one story that has never been told: how the gutter press scrapes up the dirt. From courtroom testimony and questioning of smut-smugglers from Manhattan to Hollywood. TIME describes this week how the top scandalmag operates. For Confidential's own inside story, see PRESS, Putting the Papers to Bed.

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