A Letter From The Publisher, Aug. 6, 1951

News reporting is more than writing down what is in front of a reporter's eyes. Many great events (battles, national elections, economic trends) cannot be grasped by a single witness. The record has to be pieced together from scores of individual observations. Usually, TIME'S editors do the work of piecing together; sometimes much of this work is done for them by a reporter in the field, working from the accounts of other men. That is what happened on TIME'S story of the Kansas City flood.

The flood was covered by TIME String (part-time) Correspondent Champ Clark, grandson...

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