July 15, 1993

Duty-bound to make it clear that people may not play subway motorman whenever they like but wary of punishing a folk hero -- and a mere boy, at that -- law-enforcement officials settled yesterday on three years' probation for the 16-year-old who took the controls of a subway train for three and a half hours in May. The penalty appeared not to dim the youth's dreams one whit. Leaving a Manhattan court with a plea bargain that will keep him out of jail, Keron Thomas said, "I'm going to become a train operator."

THERE are bellowing alligators, the world's loudest frogs, and a man-eating clamshell from the Philippines at what's left of the family estate where Bailey White lives with her mama, Rose. There are fluffy blue hydrangeas, gardens of thyme, rosemary and scented geraniums, put-out-to-pasture automobiles, an antique gasoline pump, bright orange Mexican sunflowers, and monarch and parsnip swallowtail butterflies. In short, this looks about right for the world of Miss White, whose commentaries on National Public Radio about eccentric relatives and rural life and whose surprise bestseller, "Mama Makes Up Her Mind," (Addison-Wesley) have transformed her from a first-grade teacher living with her mother in South Georgia to a reluctant and somewhat baffled minor celebrity.

If ever an issue cried out for simplification, it is the amortizing of intangible assets, a topic so bizarrely arcane that many people are ignorant of it, experts get lost in it and judges regularly disagree on just how to do it. So this spring, Congress inserted into President Clinton's economic package a proposal to do just that. Now it is about to reap the whirlwind.

There's nothing like a charity event to lay an old feud to rest. Mario Buatta, the society decorator, and Mollie Wilmot, the society race horse owner, who had not spoken since the Winter Antiques Show in New York in 1985, were reconciled this week during the festivities surrounding the opening of the Saratoga Designer Show House 1993.

Its routes lack the range of American, United and Delta. And the best in-flight meal it serves -- a bag of peanuts -- pales next to the Champagne and shrimp served in first and business class by carriers following grander airline traditions. But Southwest Airlines, by many measures, has emerged as the nation's pre-eminent airline, in large part because of its enthusiastic flouting of conventional industry thinking.