Every issue of PEOPLE is a celebration—of human beings—but the issue this week is a little special. It marks our sixth birthday.
That means more than 20,000 men, women and children—famous and obscure—have passed through these pages, their stories entertaining, informing, moving and intriguing you, our readers.
In your letters every week, and in our PEOPLE Readers' Poll—a new edition of which, incidentally, will appear in an upcoming issue—you've shared with us your thoughts and feelings, a part of yourselves. Now I think it's time you met some of us—specifically, the staff correspondents in our eight regional editorial bureaus.
Our busiest office is in Los Angeles, headed by bureau chief Lois Armstrong. A former TIME staffer, Lois has a master's degree from Columbia University. She worked as a journalist in Paris for eight years before settling in L.A. Appropriately, one of her first freelance pieces from there was the basis for a movie in the early '60s, Ladybug, Lady bug.
The Washington scene is covered for us by Garry Clifford and Clare Crawford-Mason. As the daughter of a U.S. Foreign Service officer, Garry grew up abroad. She did a six-month tour in Iran with the U.S. Information Service before moving to Washington in 1960 to work on the presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy.
Clare is a fourth-generation Washingtonian whose reporter grandfather covered William Howard Taft's administration. She worked for three Washington newspapers before branching out to include TV documentaries among her credits.
Gail Jennes, our Boston correspondent, is a Wellesley graduate who majored in history and always thought she would be a teacher and author of biographies. As it turned out, she writes some of the major profiles for PEOPLE and teaches on the side in the Harvard University extension program.
Chicago bureau chief Linda Witt was a newspaper reporter by the age of 16 in her hometown of Grand Junction, Colo. From there she went to Northwestern University, and later reported for the Milwaukee Sentinel and Chicago's American. She was executive editor of Pioneer Press, Time Inc.'s chain of suburban weeklies, when we asked her to join PEOPLE. Linda's associate in Chicago, Giovanna Breu, holds a master's degree from Columbia and was a LIFE reporter for 12 years in New York, Washington and Chicago.
London bureau chief Fred Hauptfuhrer is a transplanted Philadelphian who moved to England in 1960 and wrote for UPI and the Guardian. He has a master's degree from the London School of Economics.
Nancy Faber worked for TIME and LIFE in New York before transferring to San Francisco. She spent her first year as our bureau chief there fearing that it was going to be a one-subject town: Patty Hearst. After Patty was imprisoned, Nancy got the first full interview given by Hearst and her fiancé, Bernard Shaw.
Our two newest bureau chiefs are Frank W. Martin in Denver and Kent Demaret in Houston. Frank started his newspaper career at Pioneer Press and helped produce a story about heroin that earned his papers a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Kent is a native Texan who was assistant city editor of the Houston Press at 26. He reported for LIFE and TIME for seven years, worked on more than 200 shows for Public Television and the BBC and has written two books.
In addition to these 10 staff correspondents, more than 100 other reporters work for us part-time in the U.S. and abroad, all under the direction of News Editor Hal Wingo. There is no unproductive place for PEOPLE stories, just as there is virtually no spot in the country that PEOPLE does not reach. For this, our appreciation goes to the supermarkets, drugstores, convenience stores, variety stores, newsstands and terminals which carry PEOPLE, and to the magazine wholesalers whose distribution network makes that possible. We also thank our advertisers for their continued endorsement. As proof of that, we now have advertising branch offices in Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco and, next week, Boston.
Most of all, we are grateful to you, our readers, for making PEOPLE a part of your busy lives and for sharing in our celebration every week.
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