ON the TIME masthead this week appears a familiar name in an unfamiliar location. Home from the wars, coups and crises is veteran Correspondent James Bell to head our expanded New York bureau.

In his 15 years of reporting from abroad, Kansas-born Bell has roamed the world in pursuit of the big stories, and some little ones. On and off he covered the fighting in Korea, the Congo and Viet Nam. Leaving for Korea, he said: "I feel like the firehouse Dalmatian when the bell rings." At Inchon, he became the Korean War's 27th casualty among newsmen when he suffered a fractured arm and chest injuries.

On the lighter side, when he left Beirut in 1954 after three years as Middle East bureau chief, he was the subject of a tongue-in-cheek U.S. embassy cable to the State Department. Dispatch No. 439 began: "Plumpish, sunburned, middle-aging James Bell had been a man with a timely mission: to present the complex, rapidly unfolding story of the Middle East to TIME readers."

While in the Middle East, he came to know Nasser well, and predicted --a year before it happened--that the colonel would emerge as the real power in Egypt. Bell was at Belgrade's Zemun Airport to witness the arrival of Russia's Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin; he reported the visit that drew world attention to Mr. K., vodka for vodka. Later, when Khrushchev made the sensational but top-secret Kremlin speech that demolished Stalin, Bell was in Moscow and got wind of it. During two tours of duty in Bonn, he covered the Berlin Wall, the 1956 Hungarian uprising, and matters as disparate as what Chancellor Adenauer was thinking and what the German burgher was eating.

Not that Bell is a stranger to the U.S. scene. After graduating from the University of Kansas, he went to work for TIME as Topeka stringer, later joined our Chicago bureau.

Among the many domestic stories he covered, old-TIMErs best remember his interview with a wayfarer on Chicago's Skid Row (July 22, 1946), his report on the Centralia mine disaster (April 7, 1947), and the two Alger Hiss trials.

Working with Bell in New York will be Deputy Bureau Chief Nick Thimmesch, who will continue to scout New York politics; Peter Vanderwicken, whose speciality is economics; Marcia Gauger, who has been reporting business news; Christopher Cory, who concentrates on back-of-the-book stories; Rosalind Constable, who prepares a report on the cultural scene; Michael Parks and Robert Smith, who are general assignment reporters.

The bureau which Bell now heads is unique among the 34 that TIME operates around the world. In a sense, all 155 writers, researchers and editors working in the Time & Life Building constitute a news bureau in that they often do their own reporting. But New York has grown so big and complex that Bell's expanded staff is necessary to give the fullest coverage to the city he calls "the meeting place of the world."

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