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Patrick Kiger

Biography: Journalist Patrick J. Kiger tells the stories of people who make their mark in ways big and small.

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Boomers Once Led the World in Education. What Happened?

Posted on 06/19/2013 by | Who's News | Comments

Bulletin TodayIn the 1960s and 1970s, the United States had the best-educated young people in the world, or pretty close to it. But a disturbing new report from the Council on Foreign Relations says that the generations who’ve followed the boomers haven’t been able to maintain that global edge — and that, as a result, America’s ability to compete economically is suffering as well. Related: Are We Teaching Our Next Generation the Right Stuff? The council, a nonpartisan think tank whose …

Isabel Benham: Wall Street Pioneer

Posted on 06/18/2013 by | Who's News | Comments

Bulletin Today | Legacy | WorkIsabel Benham was the first woman to become a partner at a Wall Street bond firm, but it wasn’t easy. When she graduated from Bryn Mawr with a degree in economics in 1931, a dean at the school gave her some advice on how to get a job in the financial industry: Learn to type. Others were more dismissive. “Go home to mother, join the Junior League, get married and live happily ever after,” she recalled them saying. Fortunately, Benham, …

The Behind-the-Scenes King of Comedy

Posted on 06/17/2013 by | Who's News | Comments

Bulletin Today | Entertainment | LegacyBernard “Bernie” Sahlins, co-founder of Chicago’s Second City theatrical troupe, wasn’t a comedian himself. But thanks to him, we’ve all had a lot of laughs over the past few decades. Without Sahlins, who died on June 16 at age 90 in Chicago, George Wendt — best known for his role as Norm Peterson in the iconic 1980s-early 1990s sitcom Cheers — might have abandoned comedy and perhaps even become an accountant. As Wendt recently recalled, after he and other Second City newbies in the …

Did This Actor Invent the Gourmet Hamburger?

Posted on 06/11/2013 by | Who's News | Comments

Bulletin Today | Food | Legacy | Your LifeIf you’re a devotee of the Turner Classic Movies cable channel, you may well know Harry Lewis, even though you might not recognize his name. In the 1948 classic Key Largo, Lewis played Edward “Toots” Bass, a dapper but menacing gunman in a gang — led by Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson) — that takes the occupants of a hotel hostage as a hurricane approaches. When the hotel’s owner, portrayed by Lionel Barrymore, asks whether their motive is robbery, Lewis …

Bob Thompson: He Made Music to Sip Martinis By

Posted on 06/10/2013 by | Who's News | Comments

Bulletin Today | LegacyTo embrace the swinging bachelor lifestyle touted in Playboy magazine in the late 1950s and early ’60s, you needed a few accessories to set a properly free-spirited, licentious ambiance. They included a cocktail shaker, a turtleneck to wear inside your button-down shirt and the just-invented Lutron dimmer switch to turn the lights down low. You also needed some records that would show off the utter aural magnificence of your top-of-the-line hi-fi, and that’s where arranger, composer and bandleader Bob Thompson came …

Is Your Waistline a Stem Cell Warehouse?

Posted on 06/10/2013 by | Who's News | Comments

Beauty & Fashion | Bulletin Today | Personal HealthIf you’ve ever so much as considered liposuction, it’s probably because you want to look more buff. (That is, unless you’re Miami avant-garde performance artist Orestes De La Paz, who made some of his adipose tissue into soap.) Now there may be an additional reason to have excess fat surgically suctioned from your body: The unsightly stuff turns out to be a rich source of stem cells. Someday doctors might be able to use the cells to repair your heart, …