WOMAN RETIRES AFTER SAVING HUNDREDS OF BIBB MOTHERS FROM DRUGS

The soft-spoken woman who used to comb Macon's toughest neighborhoods in a
Mercedes looking for addicts to save won't be coming around anymore.

Rosemary Brown Heath retires today, and the people she's helped - saved,
really - are just sick about it. For 31 years, Brown Heath helped people
recover from addiction through various local programs. The past 10 years,
she's been director of Project Connect, a program tailored for pregnant
women and mothers coping with drug abuse.

She took women off the street and into the clinic. By her count, more than
160 babies were "born clean" on her watch, their mothers weaned from crack
cocaine. Their smiling faces - both white and black - are tacked to a
bulletin board in the office she built up over the years from a single room
to a complex with 24 employees. An average of 80 women are treated every
day, according to program numbers.

To Brown Heath, 60, everyone is Mr. this or Ms. that, their first names
combined with the title. Employees, friends and clients are "honey" or
"sweetie." She runs her office with a calm and sweet determination.

"Rosemary showed me a better way of life," says Trellis Gibson, one of
Brown Heath's former clients and, like many recovering addicts, now a
Project Connect employee. "She's been like a guardian angel for me."

Gibson's story is one of thousands. She started using drugs - all kind of
drugs - at 16, she says. At 18, unmarried and smoking crack almost
constantly, she had her first child. She attended a junior college, but
would leave class to go smoke crack, she says. Of her four children, only
the last was born clean.

"Thanks to Rosemary," Gibson says.

Today, Brown Heath and Frank Fields, director of River Edge Behavioral
Health Center, Bibb County's mental health and drug recovery agency,
estimate that 3,000 to 4,000 women have been through Project Connect's
doors during its decade of existence.

But in the beginning, clients were scarce. Scared and ashamed, they
wouldn't show up for treatment, even when referred by area hospitals or
social service agencies.

So there went Brown Heath, with her white skin and poofed blond hair,
riding around Macon's ramshackle neighborhoods in a Mercedes-Benz, knocking
on doors, sticking out like a sore thumb and scared to death at times, but
seldom showing the strain.

"It was kind of scary, because I didn't know what was going to happen," she
says. "But I was pretty intent on getting moms into treatment ... so I
really didn't much think about that. I had a mission."

The first time Gibson rode to Project Connect in Brown Heath's car was
"awesome" for a broken-down and hopeless young woman, Gibson says.

"Awesome because she'd ride me, pitiful old drug addict me, in her car,"
Gibson remembers. "I cried that night. Somebody cared."

Brown Heath got her foot in the door by being brazen, knocking on the doors
of crack houses and being "more determined they were gonna come than they
were that they weren't," she recalls.

But she knew many potential clients wouldn't relate to a white woman with a
nice car and salon-fresh hairdo, so she recruited recovering addicts to
work as volunteers at first and, eventually, as full-time employees. She
called former clients, women she met in the 12-step and 28-day programs
she'd been associated with before Project Connect began to grow in 1992.

She called recovering addict Michelle McKay, a woman once so desperate she
used to steal from her mother and move from crack house to crack house with
her belongings in a black garbage bag. There was nothing in her life but
drugs then, McKay says. Not her family, not her two kids, not herself. Only
crack, she says.

McKay hit bottom more times than she can recall. Eventually, she checked
into a program and met Brown Heath. Ten years later, she's sober and works
full time with Project Connect. Brown Heath essentially saved her life and
has been the rock she's leaned on for a decade, McKay says.

When McKay started with the program part time in 1992, the project's yearly
budget was about $25,000, all from a state grant, Brown Heath said. Now
it's almost $800,000, mostly raised from county, state and federal money.

The program "had women and babies just piled on top of each other" in the
early years, said Fields, who took over as director of River Edge in 1994.
Brown Heath told him that if she could have more space, the program would
grow "unbelievably," Fields said. Then she wanted somewhere for her clients
to sleep so they wouldn't have to go to the streets at night, where
temptation was high. The program began renting apartments to use as safe
houses.

Brown Heath credits Fields with the vision to expand the program, but he
calls her the driving force behind its growth.

"She is the one," Fields said. "She had a true passion for that."

After today, Project Connect nurse Carol Griffith will take over as
director. She's got "that zeal" a director needs, Brown Heath says.

McKay and other clients-turned-employees say they'll be OK without their
old boss, but they really don't want to see her leave.

As for Brown Heath, she and her husband plan to travel, spend time at their
Florida beach house and visit their six grandchildren (a seventh is on the
way). Eventually, she figures to miss this world of pain and hope and says
she'll probably take on some sort of part-time job in social work. But for
now, the weight of responsibility for Macon's addicted mothers has been
lifted from her shoulders.

"She's given us what we need to carry on," says McKay. "And it's time for
her to sit back and look at the water."