Daily News from New York, New York • 1008

p. 'i iii: mr 3 B-r inn sv fjsflgwjwifaiis a. I i 5 By MICHAEL CONLOM 1 HISTORIC SIT-IN: Joseph McNeil (right) was one of four North Carolina students taking part in the 1960 sit-ins at the lunch counter at the Woolworth's store in Greensboro. N.C. With him are.

from left. David Richmond, Franklin McCain and Ezell Blair. Jr. CMS etImIb End for a Southern 5 10 By JAY MAEDER Dnly Stdfl Anlef GREENSBORO, N.C. There are no more specials at the old Woolworth's lunch counter on South Elm St.

The eggs ran out a week ago, so breakfast isn't much either. When the bacon goes, that will be it for the BLTs. Not that WoolwortfTs was This one happens to be a such a fine place to eat in historic site, launchpoint of lr ViL its best day. That irony has CHICAGO First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton said she and the President plan a public signing of "living wills" or similar documents directing each other when to end life support in a terminal illness or injury. She said she hoped the gesture would help stir a national debate about the need for such planning in the context of health care reform and questions being raised about unnecessary medical expenditures.

"What we believe is that when every American is guaranteed health security, as part of the ongoing education about health-related issues, we hope there will be a much greater willingness to talk about these difficult life and death issues before they arise in a family or individual context," she said Thursday. "We want very much for people to sign living wills, to sign advance directives, to have those conversations with their family members and with their doctors and other health caregivers," she-said. "Because what often happens is that at the time of the emergency when someone is brought into a hospital, if that discussion has not occurred there is very little that the family members feel to do. Not an easy issue "Although we've talked about it like most Americans, we have not wanted to deal with it. It is not an easy issue to deal with.

But we intend to try to do that and maybe by example try to get the rest of the country talking about it," she said. A living will is a legal document in which a person tells a doctor at what point life support is to be withdrawn. Another method of doing the same thing is through a pow-er-of-attorney for health care which gives a friend or family member the power to speak for the patient in life support questions. Her comments came in re-. sponse to a question during a lunchtime appearance in the lobby of a state office building in downtown Chicago.

The man who asked the question said he was making a documentary film about euthanasia and right-to-die questions, and wanted to know how President Clinton's health care reform posals tackled that issue. cyG T1'i LONG WAY: Joseph McNeil of Hempstead, L.I., says he'll return for store's closing ceremonies, if there are any. hodabakhshandagi the seminal student sit-ins that in 1960 successfully broke down the extant color bars at eating places throughout much of the South. Civic-minded locals are hoping that it might somehow be preserved as a civil rights shrine. At present, this is unassured, but there will be ceremonies at the very least.

Joseph McNeil imagines he'll attend them. "I do feel some sense of ownership," he said in an exclusive interview with The News. McNeil, who went on from Ag Tech to become a Federal Aviation Administration manager and who now lives in Hempstead, "was never a career civil rights activist," but he's well aware of his place in history. He's already returned to Greensboro for 10th, 20th and 30th anniversary rites to reenact the sit-in that began on Feb. 1, 1960, when he and Franklin McCain and David Richmond and Ezell Blair Jr.

were refused lunch-counter service. That first day it was just the frightened four of them, declining to leave their seats at the all-white counter. Within days there were scores more. Soon the demonstrations spread to 54 cities in nine states, galvaniz- never been lost on Joseph McNeil. Thirty-three years a no, McNeil and his North Carolina Ag Tech classmates spent five months of their lives desegregating Woolworth's just to win the rinht to sit beside the white man and drink bad coffee.

Come January and this old Woolworth's BIRTHPLACE OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, like the concrete marker says out front will be gone the way of the S.H. Kress store up the street, padlocked and dark and full of ghosts. The K.W. Woolworth Co. is making fast work of the shutdown.

Last week all items were marked lOr off. This week it's 20. Everything, as they say, must go. Time was when small Southern cities pretty much revolved around their downtown five-and-dimes. This was one showboat Wool-worth's when it was built in 1938.

But those days are past. Mr. Frank Winfield Woolworth's mercantile empire lost $54 million last year, victim of a "depressed consumer-spending environment," as company chairman William Lavin puts it. More than 700 stores across the land are closing. tj Ul ing a movement still a year away from the Alabama Freedom Rides, two years away from James Meredith and three years away from King's "I Have A Dream" speech.

Color bar falls Woolworth's gave up on July 25, 1960, dropping the color bars at its Southern lunch counters, and the company went on to aspire to corporate good works. Years later, when McNeil, Richmond and Blair (who now calls himself Jibreel Khazan) reassembled in Greensboro, they were greeted by a black Woolworth's vice president. And McNeil remembers shaking the hand of Curly Harris, the store manager who had refused him coffee. "There was no malice," McNeil says. "People grow." McNeil often addresses school groups discussing, he says, "that spirit of mov ing forward, of trying to make things work" and he's often asked for his long-range assessment of what he accomplished 33 years ago.

There are not so many pat answers to that, given, among other things, that Klansmen and American Nazis killed five civil rights marchers in Greensboro in 1979 and that the Klan marched here as recently as six years ago. "We changed some minds and we won some hearts," is about all he wants to say about it "We built some coalitions. I think we made America a stronger place." Blacks and whites mix affably at the Woolworth's counter but the lunch specials are gone. "Menu? Ain't no menu," the waitress says. "How about a grilled cheese?" She wipes the counter and thinks.

"Got a little apple pie left," she offers. 3 UJAJS YJHJVAW i ta Nre.