When the American Newspaper Publishers Association held its annual convention in New York City recently, one of the busiest publishers I know stopped in to chat with several members of TIME's staff. He is Robert Atwood, who is not only editor and publisher of the Anchorage, Alaska Daily Times and chairman of the Alaska Statehood Committee, but also TIME's correspondent in Anchorage.
Atwood isn't quite sure how he got to be a TIME correspondent. It began, he remembers, when he started getting wires from TIME about 15 or 16 years ago, asking for information about Alaska. Busy as he was, he obligingly went to work digging up the facts and answered the wires. Said he: "Sometimes the stuff appeared in the magazine; sometimes it didn't. Then I came to New York on business and dropped in on TIME. I was surprised to learn I was listed as a part-time correspondent."
A major problem at first was that TIME would ask for information from all over Alaska, and "it's a big place." Bob Atwood solved that by relaying the queries to various friends he had made in his travels around the country—other editors, postmasters, schoolteachers.
Atwood is a native of Chicago, but his family roots go back to frontier days in Alaska. One of his uncles had made geological surveys for the Government all over Alaska, and another uncle had founded the Bank of Alaska.
When Atwood attended Clark University in Worcester, Mass., his father wanted him to become a lawyer, and the geologist uncle, then president of the university, urged him to be a geographer. But Atwood decided on a newspaper career, went to work first for the Worcester Telegram and Evening Gazette and later for the Illinois State Journal in Springfield.
While he was in Springfield, his mother wrote to suggest that he look up a young lady who was doing social work there. She was the daughter of the man who had succeeded Atwood's uncle as president of the Bank of Alaska. Atwood decided he had better things to do with his time. Later his mother moved to Springfield, saw to it that her son met the young lady by inviting her to dinner. Atwood decided that he hadn't had better things to do after all, married her a few months later.
When he heard that an Anchorage newspaper was for sale, he bought it. That was in 1935 and the beginning of a blizzard of work for Atwood. The paper's circulation was then 650, and it was printed on an old hand-fed press. Says he: "I never worked so hard in my life before. But the town was growing and healthy, and the paper grew with it. We have two new presses now, built a new plant double the size of the old one, added two more wings since 1946. The Daily Times circulation is now 16,000, and it has a staff of 60 full-time people."