ATLANTA, Ga. -- Wherever you are in the world, you could run into a ``Windy.''

``Windy'' is affectionate code for fans of Gone with the Wind, and they are legion.

Windies are even more avid this year, which marks the 70th anniversary of the film premiere. Many are heading to Georgia, where Atlanta's Margaret Mitchell unleashed one of the world's best-selling novels in 1936.

They long to discover Mitchell's Georgia of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and they arrive with questions. Here are some of the Windies' most enduring quests.

WHERE'S TARA?

Every Windy longs for the towering white pillars of Tara, but the mansion we love was basically a confection whipped up by producer David O. Selznick.

The native Pittsburgher, who called Gone with the Wind ``the American Bible,'' envisioned a plantation house like the antebellum mansions lining the Mississippi. Mitchell's Tara, however, was modeled after her great-grandparents' farmstead in Clayton County, a two-story frame house with a comfy porch. The family called it ``Rural Home.''

``When Margaret Mitchell saw the film, she said `That's not the house I wrote about,' '' said Ted Key, a costumed docent at Stately Oaks in Jonesboro, Clayton County.

Rural Home, built about 1831 by Mitchell's Irish ancestor Philip Fitzgerald, is now in ruins. Instead, head down Carriage Lane to Stately Oaks, an 1839 home in the Plantation Plain style of Rural Home.

``Windies always ask, `Is this Tara?' '' Key said. ``It's as close to Tara as you're going to get.''

Stately Oaks reflects a prosperous farm life, with a piano and lovely china on the dining table. The Fitzgeralds, according to the Road to Tara Museum in Jonesboro, were once the wealthiest family in Clayton County.

It was on the Fitzgeralds' front porch that young Margaret heard tales of the war.

``I heard about fighting and wounds ladies nursed in the hospitals; the way gangrene smelled. I heard about the burning and looting of Atlanta. I heard everything in the world except that the Confederates lost the war. When I was 10 years old,'' Mitchell recalled, her words immortalized in a display at the Road to Tara Museum. ``It was a violent shock to learn that General Lee had been licked.''

Hollywood may not have gotten Rural Home right, but it did create an indelible illusion beloved around the world.

In 1979, Georgia's First Lady, Betty Talmadge, bought the studio façade of Tara's doorway and it's now in pride of place at Atlanta's Margaret Mitchell House and Gone with the Wind Museum.

THE MANUSCRIPT

Travelers would love to see the original pages of the best-selling novel, but Margaret Mitchell was having none of it.

Her second husband, John Marsh, who'd urged Mitchell to write, said her will placed upon him ``the duty of destroying her papers.'' She believed, Marsh is quoted in an exhibit at the Margaret Mitchell House and Gone With the Wind Museum, ``that an author should stand or fall before the public on the basis of the author's published work.''

Only 20 or so pages survive, and if you really want to see them, there's only one thing to do.

Sue.

``There are a few pages in the Sun Trust Bank, where they will remain unless someone challenges her authorship,'' said Richard Cruce, the librarian who handles the Mitchell collection at the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System.

But you won't leave the library disappointed. Fans from 38 states and 13 countries came last year to see the Remington typewriter that Mitchell wrote GWTW on -- last chapter first. She wrote out of chronology from 1926 on, eventually weaving the chapters together about 1935.

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