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All the while flourished a classical inversion of sentences. An early writer, possibly suffering from a hangover, took the technique over the top with this effort: "A ghastly ghoul prowled around a cemetery not far from Paris. Into family chapels went he, robbery of the dead intent upon." But in 1936, TIMEstyle began to suffer bouts of self-consciousness. That was the year that the New Yorker, edited by an old nemesis of Luce's, Harold Ross, published Wolcott Gibbs' hilarious and devastating parody of TIME. "Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind," Gibbs wrote. He described Luce as an "ambitious, gimlet-eyed Baby Tycoon...efficient, humorless...brusque, contradictory, hostile."
Luce was annoyed. At Rollins College, where he went to speak a few years later, he discovered that students in a class in contemporary biography were discussing him--and using as their text "that goddam article in the New Yorker...Is this thing going to be engraved on my tombstone?"
Luce and Hadden put together the TIME prospectus in an upstairs office on East 17th Street in Manhattan. Soon, with a staff of 33, the magazine moved its offices to a loft building on 39th Street, former home of Hupfel's brewery. In 1925, when Hadden took a European vacation, Luce indulged his wistfulness for heartland America (the instinct of a missionary's China-born child) and arranged to move the magazine to Cleveland, Ohio. The experiment mortified the pub-crawling and cosmopolitan Hadden, who waited until Luce went abroad two years later to organize a countermove, shipping everyone back to New York City.
When TIME began, its handful of writers assembled their material from newspaper clippings and a few reference books. In 1929 the first correspondent, David Hulburd, opened a bureau in Chicago, and a network of stringers--part-time, free-lance reporters--was organized to report from cities in the U.S. and Canada. During the '30s and early '40s, as the news turned urgent and global, TIME expanded its network into what eventually became the Time-Life News Service. By 1958 the magazine had 435 correspondents, stringers and writers reporting from 33 locations around the world. With advances in communications technology, those numbers have since been reduced, but a network of bureaus remains the core of the magazine's newsgathering system.
The TIME editorial process, evolved over a period of years, had the unique collective concentration (and for years, the anonymity) of a well-run beehive. Correspondents went forth into the fields collecting pollen (data, interviews, "bioperse"--or life stories with anecdotes and color) and sent it back to the New York hive by wire in long reports (files)--an immense redundancy of information that writers in New York boiled and kneaded and licked into stories for the magazine.
Senior editors then set to work. Some--like Laird Goldsborough, Foreign News editor in the '30s, or Whittaker Chambers, when he held the same post in the '40s--were famous around the magazine for rewriting almost every word of copy, using the writer's version merely as a guide for straight lines upon which to pencil the interlinear substitute. When the senior editor had initialed the copy, his version, retyped, went to the managing editor, whose mind was the needle's eye through which the entire magazine passed each week before going to Chicago to be printed.