Dear TIME-Reader:

AT Gettysburg last week, where President Ike Eisenhower was signing bills into law and relaxing on his farm (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), a familiar face was missing from the presidential press corps. After eight years of covering the White House, TIME'S Edwin Darby was moving from the nation's capital to the Midwest to become deputy chief of our Chicago bureau.

Said Darby, who has visited just about every state in the Union on presidential tours: "I consider myself one of the country's foremost authorities on airports, railroad stations, hotel lobbies and auditoriums. It will be nice to learn what surrounds these things in the Midwestern states."

Maryland-born Ed Darby will take with him many pleasant memories of the two men whom he had come to know well as Presidents of the U.S.: Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower. "Truman was one of the nicest men to be around," said Darby. And so was Ike. "Only once that I know of has Ike got sore at me," he recalled. "That was when he read a TIME personality piece in which I reported that on occasion his temper boiled over violently and he expressed himself in fine barracks-room language. Purple-faced, Ike denied my report in language that almost scorched the White House walls down to the char marks made by the British burning in the War of 1812."

Darby's chief regrets now are for the lost opportunities to fill out presidential foursomes at bridge and golf. On a campaign trip in 1952, Candidate Eisenhower invited Darby to play a rubber of bridge, but Darby pretended that he did not play. "I was certain I'd pull some boner that would forever mark me in Ike's book as a man not to be trusted," he says. Last year, during Ike's last Denver vacation, the chance came to play golf with the President. "I had to decline," Darby explains ruefully, "because it just happened that the editors of TIME wanted some rush copy that day."

Just before Darby left Washington, Ike's White House assistants gave him a rousing sendoff. During the party, Darby received a dummy copy of TIME with a picture of himself on the cover. Said the cover caption: "For Ike relief, for Chicago chaos." A few minutes later, a White House aide handed the correspondent a small envelope. It contained a warm personal farewell from Ike and Mamie. In a tongue-in-cheek postscript, the President stoutly denied that on Darby's departure there would be "For Ike relief, for Chicago chaos."

Cordially yours,