Dykman had no sooner picked out and assigned his reporters than the Census declared in an October 12 press release that the population would reach 300 million five days later, on October 17. ^[34] If the project went to the printers on Saturday, October 21, as planned, it would hit newsstands on Monday, October 23, six days after the event. Other news outlets would already have reported on it and moved on. Given the unusually tight deadline, as well as the fact that Time ’s story would end up behind the news, Dykman and other editors discussed whether it made sense to postpone the project. “We missed that date,” Dykman recalls thinking. “It’s October. Let’s just wait till March. Why not? We did have that talk… Part of me was like… yeah, let’s wait. Because now that I have an idea, I know I can finish it by March.”

On the other hand, the time lag might not matter to readers. “It’s still in people’s minds,” Dykman remembers thinking. “It’s still just plain interesting.” Besides, there was a risk that if Dykman did not do the story now, it might never appear in the magazine. “I’ve seen it happen so many times around here,” Dykman recalls, “where cover contenders… don’t make it by the end of that week and you never hear from them again.”

But the general sense of the 10 a.m. editorial meeting on Friday, October 13 was that the news peg was, in Dykman’s words, “nice, but not critical.” True, Managing Editor Stengel still had not given Dykman any guarantee that his piece would see print. If urgent news broke during the week of October 16, the magazine might not be able to commit space to Dykman’s graphic snapshot of America. Nevertheless, Dykman had already invested two weeks in the project. He was encouraged by the level of enthusiasm it seemed to generate among his colleagues. He decided to keep it alive.