This is the time of year that brings moments of wistful nostalgia to many an office-bound adult watching the younger generation heading back to school. Here at TIME, two adults were recently offered the chance to go back to school for a year themselves. These two TIME employees temporarily turned scholars are Dave Richardson and Elisabeth Hanna.

For the past 14 months Dave Richardson has been a TIME correspondent in the Middle East, with headquarters in Beirut. Having spent only five weeks of the past six years in the U.S., he is looking forward to a Quiet Year Of academic life. He is back on a leave of absence to accept one of the fellowships for American foreign correspond ents granted by the Council on Foreign Relations.

The council, which began shortly after World War I (and publishes the quarterly review Foreign Affairs), is a nonprofit institution devoted to research and study of the international aspects of American political and economic problems. The purpose of the fellowship is to "help correspondents to increase their competence to report and interpret events abroad ... to give men who have been preoccupied with meeting deadlines an opportunity to broaden their perspective by means of a coordinated program of reading, study and informal discussion." Richardson will study at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs, and commute to New York for council meetings, symposiums with visiting statesmen, and library research.

Richardson, a journalism graduate of Indiana University, came to TIME after a war career as a soldier-reporter for Yank Magazine in the Far East. He was the Army weekly's first cor respondent in the Pacific, covered the New Guinea campaign, walked an esti mated 600 miles in forays behind enemy lines in Burma with Merrill's Marauders, rode the first convoy over the Ledo-Burma Road from India to China, dropped into Japanese-held Rangoon with Gurkha paratroops, and was awarded the Legion of Merit by General Douglas MacArthur.

Hired by TIME in 1945, Richardson went back to India, set up our first postwar bureau in New Delhi, and two years later moved to Germany to open the TIME office in Frankfurt. His next assignment was TIME's London bureau, where he spent two years before moving to the Middle East tour of duty.

Richardson, with his wife and two daughters (Hilary, 4, born in Frankfurt, and Julia, 2, born in London), made the return trip to the U.S. last month by ship, "because we felt the children should get some sense of transition from country to country." The move from London to Beirut, Richardson explained, "was about an eight-hour plane ride. For nearly a year afterward, Hilary thought we were still in England, and kept asking when we were going to take the bus back to London."

Now in the quiet Princeton countryside, the Richardsons will enjoy the pleasant experience of watching their children discover their homeland.

Headed in the opposite direction for her year of study is Elisabeth Hanna, who left her TIME desk with a Fulbright scholarship to work in Italy at the University of Perugia and the University of Florence. Scholar Hanna, a distant relative of President-Maker Mark Hanna of Ohio, is a young lady working her way up in the newsreporting business. She came to TIME a fluent linguist in German, French and Italian, with a scholastic background of study at Vassar, Barnard and the University of Berlin. This year she learned how TIME handles its network of foreign correspondents and the flow of international news to the magazine. She worked as secretary to Foreign News Editor Thomas Griffith. At night she studied journalism and comparative literature at Columbia University.

Elisabeth Hanna, whose ambition is to become a foreign correspondent, will spend her Fulbright year in Italy doing research on the writing produced during Mussolini's regime, and the effect of a totalitarian system on modern writers.

Cordially yours,

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