This summer the journalistic demands of two political conventions plus a Summer Olympics have placed extraordinary logistical claims on the TIME staff members responsible for housing, food, transportation, security and working conditions in San Francisco, Dallas and Los Angeles. Time Inc.'s contingent at next week's Democratic National Convention will consist of more than 160 people, including 17 correspondents, 16 photographers, 20 editors, writers and reporter-researchers from TIME'S Nation section, and even 21 messengers for copy and film. Says R. Edward Jackson, deputy chief of correspondents, who is in overall charge of convention arrangements: "San Francisco is, after all, one of the most hospitable cities in the world. Who wouldn't want to spend a July week there?" Jackson has made three visits to San Francisco to talk with convention planners and city officials about TIME'S needs, and one so far to the Republican host city, Dallas.

Washington Bureau Office Manager Emily Friedrich has served as a general coordinator of the San Francisco operation, negotiating TIME'S space at the Moscone Center convention site and arranging the venue for the 1,200-guest party that Time Inc. Editor in Chief Henry Grunwald and the editors of TIME will give on the eve of the convention.

For the News Service's Suzanne Davis, top priority was the creation "from paper clips to computers" of three workplaces: one at the Moscone Center; the second, for processing film, at a nearby photo lab; and the third wilder the chandeliers of the San Francisco ""Hilton's Imperial Ballroom. The hotel facility will contain much of the equipment of a large news bureau, plus that of our New York wireroom, including sophisticated transmission computers and phone systems. So far, Housing Coordinator Pamela Thompson has reserved 162 rooms in nine different hotels in the Bay Area; the Nation-section staff will commute to the convention by ferry from Sausalito.

While San Francisco Bureau Chief Michael Moritz and Correspondent Dick Thompson were reporting this week's cover stories on the city, on-scene preparations for TIME's convention coverage were being made by Olivia Stewart, a former bureau secretary who has returned to take up such duties as renting a fleet of 25 cars to transport people, film and copy through the jammed streets. To serve as drivers, she has recruited off-duty fire fighters. Says she: "They know the city and how to get around it fast better than almost anyone." Her opinion may be a bit biased: the fire-fighter driver pool includes her husband Gregory.