IN nearly six years as a correspondent for TIME, Peter Forbath has reported the civil war in Cyprus, the Viet Nam War, the Six-Day War in the Middle East and the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. So it was with some trepidation that Forbath, now posted to the New York bureau, set out to help report this week's cover story on John Fairchild, publisher of Women's Wear Daily and ardent promoter of the controversial midiskirt. "I'm rediscovering America," says Forbath. "I found the fashion world more alien to me than Africa, Southeast Asia or Eastern Europe."

Nonetheless, Forbath's task proved fascinating and enjoyable. "Fairchild is a journalist, so he recognizes journalists' problems," says Forbath--even though there was one major surprise. He had expected Fairchild to practice the swinging, trendy life-style that his paper promotes so assiduously. Not so. Forbath discovered that his subject "hardly seems to take the scene seriously." Indeed, Forbath followed Fairchild through a full week in Manhattan, then traveled to Bermuda to spend a weekend with him and his family at their seaside home. It was a happily low-key, relaxed few days. And Mrs. Fairchild, Forbath found, "is a delightful lady who spends surprisingly little money on clothes."

Further reportage came from Mary Cronin, Jill Krementz and Researcher Ingrid Michaelis, who interviewed store executives, Seventh Avenue manufacturers and fashion experts throughout New York City. The story was written by Edwin Bolwell and edited by Peter Bird Martin, both of whom learned a great deal from the experience. As Martin put it: "Doing a story like this makes you a lot more attentive to women, to see just what it is that makes them look attractive."

As the new school year gets under way, the Education section this week takes another long, thoughtful look at the campaign to desegregate the Southern school system. The story was written by Peter Stoler, researched by Gail Lowman and edited by Laurence Barrett. The bulk of the reporting fell to Atlanta Bureau Chief Joseph Kane and Correspondent Peter Range. Kane toured Mississippi and Tennessee, where he attended the opening of an elementary school, a junior high and two high schools, in one of which all the students were black and 80% of the teachers were white. Meanwhile Range was roaming the rural roads of Georgia, where he came upon an angry confrontation in the town of Sparta. In the Faulknerian courthouse, gun-toting black parents waited impatiently while the school board debated whether or not to open the schools on time. Eventually, the board decided to delay--and the blacks, bitter though they were, decided not to resort to gunplay. What they did do was unburden to Range the extent of their frustration--and hope.

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