Palace Redeemed

Residents of Atlanta, Ga. a decade and more ago used to wonder what went on inside the handsome, white-columned mansion which stands at Peachtree Road and Wesley Avenue in the city's swankest district. Everyone knew it was the "Imperial Palace" of the Ku Klux Klan and that in it labored Hiram Wesley Evans, the Imperial Wizard and all-American antiPope.

By 1925 the Klan's power and wealth had collapsed. The palace was sold, passed through ten hands and last summer was once more up for sale. This week its four and one-half acres resound with hammers and saws. In a final and most remarkable mutation, the old Klan property is now hallowed Catholic ground. Picked up for $32,500 by the shepherd of all Georgia's Catholics, Bishop Gerald Patrick Aloysius O'Hara of Savannah, the ground floor of the old Palace has already been made into a chapel, consecrated as part of a new parish: "Christ the King." When a $200,000 church and a $32,000 parochial school are completed on the property, the Palace will become a Catholic teachers' home.

Savannah's tall, handsome Bishop O'Hara, a comparative stranger to Atlanta, professes to have known nothing of the antecedents of his palace until the sale was completed. Through similar ignorance his name has been confused lately with that of Gerald O'Hara. the hard-drinking Irish father of Heroine Scarlett O'Hara, in Novelist Margaret Mitchell's panoramic Atlanta novel. Gone With the Wind. Meticulous Author Mitchell laboriously checked reams of old records to make sure none of her names was real, but missed news accounts of Bishop O'Hara's appointment to Savannah last year (TIME, Dec. 2, 1935).

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