The Atlanta Constitution from Atlanta, Georgia • 127

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 15, 1991 Ije Atlanta 2l0umal the Atlanta constitution SECTION Celestine Sibley I 'til fcaI if yd IV k'ATl I Oswald couldn't have acted alone, I I Mr. Garrison insists P'lv 'KTS' ni No) JIM SIGMONThe (New Orieansj Times-Picayune Jim Garrison, who had a heart attack in January, plays Earl Warren in the movie based ohhis theory. Jim Garrison, whose charges of a JFK assassination plot were laughed out of court, found someone who believes him: Oliver Stone. My tombstone may be inscribed, CURIOSITY KILLED THE DA Jim Garrison, Playboy magazine, 1967 By Drew Jubera STAFF WRITER A Oil I (4 ew Orleans One thing you can do in New Orleans that you can't do anywhere else is get in a cab driven by Perry Raymond Russo. At 50, he has that not-doing-so-hot look you see on the Faith in MARTA hot misguided The trip to Birmingham had been, despite modern transportation, oxcart slow.

My admiration for MARTA led me to leave my car in Roswell and board the bus for Lenox and the fast train to the airport. Unfortunately, I even bragged a bit about it. You don't see me braving all that traffic to the airport, I told my profligate friends. You don't see me paying to park when, for $1, MARTA will pick me tip in Roswell and deliver me to the gleaming concourse of Harts-field's South Terminal. I had it planned so I would get to the airport in plenty of time to look around a bit and maybe have a roll and a cup of coffee.

5 I got to the airport just in time to leap on the plane for Birmingham. I had left Roswell at 8 a.m. I arrived at Hartsfield at 10 a.m. It couldn't take two hours to the airport, I kept telling myself, but it did. The flight to Birmingham was fast enough, and I was glad to have Delta's coffee to sustain me.

Birmingham was bright and sunny and the air felt fresh and cool. The bookstore was charming and my friends there did the best they could by me, but the autograph session wasn't exactly a mob scene. There was no jostling, pushing book-hungry crowd clamoring in the aisle and overflowing into the street. A few nicely dressed, freshly coiffed ladies came and made polite conversation. One even told me a funny story.

Her minister, she said, told her that they should not have Dr. Ferrol Sams's books in the church library. That created a dilemma for the church librarian, she said, because two of the church's elders had contributed the questionable volumes. "Well, keep them in a drawer," the minister ordered, leaving her in the position of treating three best sellers she heartily enjoyed like pornography. By 1 p.m., I was all alone with books and hungry.

So we ate a quick sandwich at the corner drugstore and left for the airport, where I hoped to take an earlier plane home. There was no earlier plane. For two hours, I inspected Birmingham's new airport, bought and read a Susan Howatch book I already had at home, ate a package of and prayed that the last express bus to Roswell would wait for me. It didn't. It was dark and cold at the Lenox MARTA station, and the local bus to Roswell wasn't due for half an hour or more.

I walked up and down and wondered who I could call if the bus didn't come. Of course it came, but it was the slow one and between the darkness and too-bright headlights, I couldn't recognize any landmarks. A line from a book I read recently lodged in my craw: "A tired woman. And lonely." Aren't we all from time to time? But my loyalty to MARTA was finally justified. I threw myself on the mercy of the driver.

Would he recognize Holcomb Bridge Road when we got there? Could he put me off where I wouldn't be killed crossing the street in the confusion of night traffic? "Yes, ma'am," he said. "I'm gon' put you off where there's a traffic light for pedestrians. I'll show you. And have a good ma'am." It wasn't a regular stop, but he made it anyhow and I made it across two busy intersections. When I got to my car, I suddenly felt better.

A tired woman, sure, but not lonely. That bus driver made the difference. A edges of Bourbon Street, and his patter loops from the subtleties of sadomasochism to the French Quarter's street grid all in a single fare. Still, Mr. Russo gives a terrific Kennedy assassination tour.

It covers the bases of Jim Garrison's infamous conspiracy theory, an operatic coup d'etat that rocked and then appalled most of the nation in 1969, when the then-New Orleans district attorney brought local business leader Clay Shaw to trial. Part of that opera has been turned into "JFK," a $40 million movie directed by Oliver Stone and starring Kevin Costner as Mr. Garrison. It opens Friday. Mr.

Russo was a star witness at the trial, a six-week courtroom Mardi Gras whose jury took SO minutes to acquit Mr. Shaw. Riding with him now in his smoke-filled cab, the Kaf-kaesque air of that earlier time is palpable. At turns intriguing, misanthropic, brilliant, unhinged, obsessed, tragic, Mr. Russo seems the perfect metaphor for a case that even Mr.

The Associated Press Jim Garrison's obsession with the JFK case created turmoil at home with his first wife and five children. Garrison called "straight out off 'Alice in Mr. Russo's tour curls by memorized addresses: the pink Victorian apartment house at 4907 Magazine, where Lee Hatvjey Oswald holed up before moving to Dallas; the whitewashed former slave quarters at 1313 Dau- I Please see GARRISON, M6 Born in 1875 in South Carolina the 15th of 1 7 children of former slaves Mary McLeod went on to become an influential educator and civil rights leader. Museum message: She opened doors to blacks in '30s By Mike Christensen WASHINGTON BUREAU Washington In the summer of 1943, longtime civil rights leader and educator Mary McLeod Bethune bought an imposing, red-brick row house in downtown Washington as the headquarters of an organization she had founded eight years before: the National Council of Negro Women. For the next seven years, during the height of her political influence as an adviser to President Franklin D.

Roosevelt and confidant of his wife, Eleanor, Mrs. Bethune lived in the Vermont Avenue house and used it as the core of her activities. On Wednesday, President Bush signed legislation adding the Mary McLeod Bethune Council House to the federal park system as a national historic site. The bill, introduced by Rep. John Lewis has already been passed by Congress.

It would be the eighth unit directly related to black history out of 179 historic sites, parks and monuments in the country with the Park Service status. "This has been a very long road," said Betty Collier-Thomas, who founded the privately run Bethune Museum and Archives in 1977. A native of ll II I Macon, she is director of the Center for African American History and Culture at Temple University in Philadelphia. The house "is a singularly important place," Dr. Collier-Thomas said.

"It is the Only museum and archives that focuses on black women in the United' States." i The three-story Second Empire-style house was built in 187S, the year Mrs. Bethune was born in an unpainted cabin in Mayesville, S.C., the 15th of 17 children of former slaves. The only member of her family who could be spared to attend a nearby Presbyterian mission school, she went on to study at Scotia Seminary in Concord, N.C., anJ Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. However, when the Presbyterian mission board refused to send her to Africa, she left Moody and devoted her energies to teaching poor children in the South, first at the Haines Institute in Augusta, The Associated Pi est "A singularly important Mary M. Bethune lived here while advising FDR.

Please see BETHUNE, M4 Nutty delight A candy's Southern ropts. M2 Holiday sites: Special CJhristmas trimmipgs. M2.