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background. For the last two nights we've been with Frank Sinatra. I assure you that nobody came up for my autograph. They were all crowding about Frank Sinatra. That's how it goes.

Now we've come to the story of my This Week column.

Phyllis and I were in Provincetown one summer with the kids. I never particularly liked it up there, but we thought that it was good for the boys to be near the sea. The reason that I didn't like it was that I couldn't get up for the weekends. It was too long a trip. There were no scheduled plane flights in those days to Cape Cod. You had to take a private plane or drive up, and it wasn't worth it.

One day, Bill Nichols, the editor of This Week magazine called me up and said that they had been talking about getting somebody for This Week to do a column every issue. Would I be interested? Well, of course I was interested. This Week was in forty-two papers then, I think, and had a circulation of about fifteen million. All the biggest papers in the country--New York Herald-Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Chicago News--were using it then. The whole Sunday supplement business has gone down-hill since because now most of the big papers have their own supplements.

There are also less papers today than there were.

Yes, but not these papers. They all survived. These were the biggest papers in the country, and they were so big