the JAZZ AGE Flapper Culture & Style

COVER BY JOHN HELD JR. “They’re all desperadoes, these kids, all of them with any life in their veins; the girls as well as the boys; maybe more than the boys.” — from “Flaming Youth,” by Warner Fabian The flapper, whose antics were immortalized in the cartoons of John Held Jr., was the heroine of the Jazz Age. With short hair and a short skirt, with turned-down hose and powdered knees – the flapper must have seemed to her mother (the gentle Gibson girl of an earlier generation) like a rebel. No longer confined to home and tradition, the typical flapper was a young women who was often thought of as a little fast and maybe even a little brazen. Mostly, the flapper offended the older generation because she defied conventions of acceptable feminine behavior. The flapper was “modern.” Traditionally, women’s hair had always been worn long. The flapper wore it short, or bobbed. She used make-up (which she might well apply in public). And the flapper wore baggy dresses which often exposed her arms as well as her legs from the knees down. However, flappers did more than symbolize a revolution in fashion and mores – they embodied the modern spirit of the Jazz Age. LOUISE BROOKS, 1920′s ADVERTISEMENT In her own way, the silent film star Louise Brooks was very much part of the Jazz Age. Her rise as a personality and as a film star was in keeping with the central phenomenom of the flapper era – the worship of youth. Brooks’ exuberant social life echoed the flamboyant tenor of the times, while her social circle included the notable figures who helped define the era – such as the composer George Gershwin and the writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Benchley, H.L. Mencken and Anita Loos. Prior to her career in Hollywood, Brooks briefly appeared in such New York stage productions as the George White Scandals and Zeigfield Follies. Her tenure on stage (and later in the movies) brought her into contact with the wealthy, the artistic and the socially glamourous figures of the 1920′s. DIXIE DUGAN She was painted by Vargas, photographed by Edward Steichen, and served as the inspiration for John H. Striebel’s long running flapper-inspired cartoon, “Dixie Dugan.” During the 1920′s, Brooks was also a model, and appeared occassionally in fashion ads. Her sleak looks and signature bob helped define the flapper look. As an actress, Brooks’ first on-screen role as a flapper was in the 1926 film A Social Celebrity. Brooks would also play flapper-like characters in Love ‘Em & Leave ‘Em (1926) and Rolled Stockings (1927). However, to the public at large, actresses like Colleen Moore, Joan Crawford (star of the popular 1928 film Our Dancing Daughters) and Clara Bow (the so-called “It” girl) would symbolize the “actress as flapper.” For a sense of what the fuss over flappers was all about – especially when it comes to clothes, check out these amusing magazine articles (with added illustrations) from the 1920′s: an attempt to bridge the generation gap: “A Flapper’s Appeal to Parents” from Outlook magazine (December 6th, 1922) an article on “Flapper Jane” from The New Republic (September 9th, 1925) and this excellent page on 1920′s Fashions Along with popular and now mostly forgotten authors of the time – such as Elinor Glyn (author of It) and Percy Marks (author of The Plastic Age), the one writer most identified with the roaring 20′s is F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 – 1940). A handsome and gregarious man, Fitzgerald became famous with the publication of his first novel This Side of Paradise (1920). The author was among the first writers to draw attention to the new post-World War I sophistication, particularly such phenomena as petting parties and youthful love affairs. Fitzgerald’s books were such a success that he became a kind of king to American youth; his queen was his beautiful, witty (and emotionally unstable) wife Zelda. SCOTT & ZELDA This royal celebrity couple became nearly as well known for their mapcap antics as for his writing. One famous incident involved them splashing in a public fountain. They also rode on the hoods of taxis, disrupted plays by laughing at the sad parts and weeping over jokes, and entertained lavishly (during Prohibition) at drunken parties. To foot the bill for their extravagant lifestyle, Fitzgerald wrote dozens of short stories for the leading magazines of the day. Both his stories and his novels record – and partly served to create – the period. Fitzgerald’s novels include The Beautiful and the Damned (1922) and The Great Gatsby (1925). His best known short story is certainly “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” which is included in Flappers and Philosophers (1920). Other story collections include Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) and All the Sad Young Men (1926). Over the last few years, Scribners has reissued Fitzgerald’s books with smart looking period covers. Also recently issued is The Jazz Age (New Directions, 1996), which gathers Fitzgerald’s reportage on the period. There are many biographies of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. For further information, be sure and visit these other links. the F. Scott Fitzgerald Centenary pages from South Carolina University THE FLAPPER by Dorothy Parker The Playful flapper here we see, The fairest of the fair. She’s not what Grandma used to be, – You might say, au contraire. Her girlish ways may make a stir, Her manners cause a scene, But there is no more harm in her Than in a submarine. She nightly knocks for many a goal The usual dancing men. Her speed is great, but her control Is something else again. All spotlights focus on her pranks. All tongues her prowess herald. For which she well may render thanks To God and Scott Fitzgerald. Her golden rule is plain enough - Just get them young and treat them rough. ANITA LOOS Besides the well known and often quotable Dorothy Parker (1893 – 1967), one other writer whose novels, movie scripts and other writings capture the spirit of the times is Anita Loos (1893 – 1981). While still a schoolgirl, Loos made a resolution never to be bored. Years later, to offset the tedium of a traintrip, she began sketching a story about a gold-haired girl named Lorelei Lee. The sketch grew into the book Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), which became such a bestseller it was even serialized in Chinese. Two of Loos’ Jazz Age classics, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the sequel But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1928) have been reissued by Penguin. Amusing period pieces, these two short novels are written as the “diaries” of a flapper who travels to Europe, meets “everyone” and returns to America to marry a millionaire. Later, Loos also authored a number of volumes of autobiographical essays and memoirs such as A Girl Like I (1966), Kiss Hollywood Goodbye (1974) and others. Long out-of-print, each contains a handful of references to Louise Brooks and other personalities of the roaring ’20′s. Further information on the youth culture of the period can be found in Paula S. Fass’ The Beautiful and the Damned: American Youth in the 1920′s (Oxford, 1977). Another good source on the broader social history of the period is Elizabeth Stevenson’s Babbits & Bohemians: The American 1920′s (Macmillian, 1967), as well as Frederick Lewis Allen’s well known and often reprinted Only Yesterday (Harper, 1931).One recent book which takes a look at the Jazz Age is Ann Douglas’ fascinating Terrible Honesty (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1995). Subtitled “Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920′s,” this book contains a handful of references to Louise Brooks. LOUISE BROOKS The cartoon at the top of this page is by John Held, Jr (1889 – 1958). More than any other illustrator, Held’s comic art captures the style and exuberant tenor of the time. If F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the dialogue for the era – its been said – John Held Jr. drew its portrait. (Follow this link to an image of two Fitzgerald books with Held dustjackets.) And like Fitzgerald, Held depicted with irony the superficial glitter of an age he nevertheless loved. Held’s work – which often depicted flappers and their collegiate male admirers – frequently appeared in such publications as Life, Vanity Fair, and The Smart Set. One book on the artist is Shelley Armitage’s illustrated biographical study, John Held, Jr.: Illustrator of the Jazz Age (Syracuse University Press, 1987). Devotees of the era’s comic art will also enjoy the two volume paperback set Cartoons of the Roaring Twenties (Fantagraphics Books, 1992). Each volume of this set contains hundreds of illustrations. 1920′S CARTOON BY LAUREN STOUT RELATED LINKS The 1920′s website All about Jazz Age Dance A Jazz Age Bibliography – a checklist of books A website called the Twenties Reconstruction Society A group of pages entitled Gatsby’s Jazz Age Echoes Here is a site called Texas Guinan’s Culture Club (and speakeasy) – an eclectic look at life in the Jazz Age. A university course on Culture in the Jazz Age – scroll down for interesting material Richard Savill’s site devoted to the music of the 1920′s, contains related links An article – “Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation” from Ladies Home Journal (August, 1921) The Louise Brooks Portrait Gallery – images from the 1920′s A paper called Louise Brooks and The Flapper Era

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June 26, 2005
Worry. But Don’t Stress Out.
By HENRY FOUNTAIN

THE theft of computer data at an Arizona company that put as many as 40 million credit card accounts at risk for fraud may have been the largest case of stolen consumer information yet.

But the incident, which was revealed last week and may have occurred months ago, surely will not be the last. In fact, the theft was only the latest in a series of incidents, not all of which involved criminal activity. Earlier this month, for example, United Parcel Service lost data tapes with personal information on nearly four million customers of Citigroup.

The problem of keeping data secure “exists on lots and lots of levels,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. “You begin to see that the United States has an enormous problem that is spiraling out of control.”

And like seismologists who can look at smaller tremors and know that a major quake is in the offing, consultants and others who study data security and identity theft can confidently predict that more trouble is ahead.

The question, for them, is one of magnitude, whether there will be the electronic equivalent of the Big One, an incident so widespread, compromising so much personal information, that it devastates the system of financial transactions that underpins the consumer economy.

Security experts acknowledge that while there will continue to be breaks in security, such a catastrophe is unlikely. Instead, they say, the threat is more insidious and gradual and involves more than just money, as other information like medical records are digitized and stored electronically.

“The long-term danger is extraction of self,” Mr. Rotenberg said. “That others know more about you than you know about yourself.”

From a financial standpoint, the 40 million accounts at risk in the most recent theft may sound like the Big One. Yet officials with Visa, MasterCard and the Tucson, Ariz., company where the theft occurred, CardSystems Solutions, were quick to point out that the records known to be stolen involved about 200,000 accounts. And even 40 million is a tiny fraction of the billions of credit cards issued worldwide.

For all their high-tech nature, crimes involving electronic data can be very labor intensive. Account information may be stolen in bulk with a few efficient lines of software code, but they are sold in much smaller numbers to other criminals who withdraw money or buy goods one transaction at a time, and usually only for a short period until the fraudulent activity is detected.

“Does anybody seriously think that a group of thieves are going to steal money from 40 million accounts?” asked Clifford Stoll, a former security consultant and author of “Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage.”

Instead of a single devastating event, a more likely outcome, many security experts say, is that smaller data thefts will continue, with a gradual nibbling away at confidence in the system. Some consumers may become more wary of electronic commerce.

“My guess is that there will continue to be a lot of low-level crime,” said Bruce Schneier, an influential security expert. “But when grandmas start losing money, Congress will have to do something.”

Specialists in data security have long thought that protections were inadequate. Edward Tenner, a columnist for Technology Review and the author of “Why Things Bite Back,” recalls speaking at security conferences nearly a decade ago “where the risk of identity theft was already considered severe.”

Data thefts and accidental losses have always occurred, Mr. Tenner said. What has changed is that there is now a law in California requiring companies to inform consumers when their information is breached.

Rebecca Bace, president of Infidel, a security consulting firm in Scotts Valley, Calif., said the law represented a fundamental change. “You no longer have the prerogative of hiding that you’ve been hacked,” she said. “People knew it was bad, but no one adequately predicted the visceral impact of seeing the number and severity of cases that have occurred.”

Ms. Bace said that the cumulative effect of such incidents might be that some people, particularly those who are already anxious about their financial situation, become more wary of electronic transactions. Reports of data thefts, she said, “make people a little more loath to take the chance.”

Fewer transactions would have a financial impact on the industry, which functions on volume, making a small amount of money on each of a huge number of transactions. “Any appreciable drop off is going to cost people a lot of money,” Ms. Bace said.

Mr. Tenner said that if security problems become overwhelming, the government could revamp the Social Security numbering system. New security measures, like retinal scans and other so-called biometric markers, are already being tested.

“Right now it is very easy to get somebody’s identity,” said Eugene H. Spafford, executive director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security at Purdue University. “Plus there is a low threshold for authentication.” To use someone else’s credit card, for instance, all that is needed is the number, name, expiration date and, possibly, the three-digit security code. (In the CardSystems case, all that information was stolen.)

What may be additionally required, Mr. Spafford said, are stronger authenticators like so-called digital wallets, which contain all the data needed for transactions in encrypted form.

Some experts argue that protecting personal data is a hopeless task, that the emphasis should be on making transactions more secure.”Making information harder to use is the key,” Mr. Schneier said. “Making it harder to steal is a dead end.”

One problem is that there currently is little financial incentive to improve security for transactions. “Credit card companies are putting the cost of fraud on the merchants, who put it on us the cardholders,” Mr. Spafford said. A governmental role may be necessary, he said.

Whatever the improvements, few experts envision a complete solution. “Any security measures are at best only buying time,” Mr. Tenner said. “It’s really like the development of antibiotics – they are always trying to stay ahead of the problem.”

“For the optimist, this can go on indefinitely,” he added. “For the pessimist, it’s like the man who jumped out of the 20th floor of a building. As he passed the 10th floor he said, ‘So far, so good.’ “

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June 26, 2005
The Boy King Has Left the Table
By ALEX WILLIAMS
Las Vegas

IN Las Vegas terms, it’s almost a rite of spring: a talented newcomer plants his elbows on the cash-green felt of a big-money table at the World Series of Poker. He gets on a roll, starts talking some trash, and inevitably, the murmurs start. “He’s the next Stuey,” somebody will say. “He’s another Kid.”

But anyone who has actually played against Stu Ungar will disagree.

“He’d kill these guys,” said Bobby Baldwin, a champion of the late 70′s, referring to the new generation of players who are expected to swell this year’s World Series of Poker to more than 6,000 contestants for its main events, more than twice the number of contestants as last year’s series, which drew about three times the number of the year before. “It wouldn’t even be close.”

Stu, or Stuey the Kid, Ungar was the swashbuckling enfant terrible of poker before it blew up into a mainstream obsession in the 1990′s. The diminutive son of a Lower East Side bookmaker, he won his back-to-back World Series of Poker titles by the unheard of age of 27 and went on to win, and lose, $30 million by one estimate before his epic taste for excess left him dead, in a cheap Las Vegas motel on Nov. 22, 1998, at 45.

A legend even when he was alive, Ungar left a legacy that has always loomed large at the World Series of Poker. It looms even larger for the hundreds of players roaming the hangarlike convention hall at Harrah’s Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino, where the tournament is being held this year. (It began on June 2 and runs through July 15.) His biography, “One of a Kind: The Rise and Fall of Stuey ‘the Kid’ Ungar, the World’s Greatest Poker Player,” by Nolan Dalla and Peter Alson, hits stores this week.

To his contemporaries, Ungar remains the ultimate gambler’s cautionary tale, the embodiment of hazardous risk. But to a wonky new generation of players, decked out in Oakley snowboarder sunglasses and iPods, schooled on Internet poker and striving for corporate sponsorship, Ungar is a renegade genius, the last and wildest of a breed of players who learned the game in illegal backroom card clubs and played the game for thrills, with rock ‘n’ roll abandon.

“He was pure id,” said Adam Schoenfeld, a youthful 41-year-old player from Brooklyn in Pumas and a trucker hat, who counts himself a member of the “cult of Stuey” and has a framed photograph of the young Ungar hanging in his apartment. “I could stare at him all day,” he said. “He’s there leaning back. He’s got his mop top. You can just see the disregard on his face for everything around him.”

As Mr. Alson, the co-author of Ungar’s biography, said, “He was the Jim Morrison of poker.”

With his hollowed cheeks and surly pout, Ungar looked the part of the romantic rebel. And having become a pet of the extended Genovese crime family after honing his skills in the shadowy card parlors of New York of the 1960′s, as his biogarphy recounts, he embraced the wiseguy swagger.

In Las Vegas, where he moved in the late 70′s, he took up with a different breed of outlaw. The reigning card sharks of the time were mostly middle-aged “rounders” from the rural South who had honed their games over decades, favored pale Stetsons and went by names like Amarillo Slim Preston and Doyle Texas Dolly Brunson.

“Back then, it was Texas oil men, gangsters, drug dealers,” Mr. Dalla recalled. “It was the Wild West. Now it’s a technical game. The math guys are taking over.”

The older players chafed at Ungar’s arrogant, abrasive style, but they could not deny his talent.

“His mind just worked 99.9999 percent faster than everybody else’s,” recalled Mike Sexton, a prominent player who often played Ungar, starting in the late 70′s.

While today’s top young players tend to be studied in their boldness, Ungar, by contrast, was known for his kamikaze fearlessness combined with a predator’s nose for weakness. “I remember him telling me, ‘I just have to make myself hate my opponents,’ ” Mr. Sexton said, speaking over the cricketlike din of thousands of clinking chips. “‘I just want to rip their throats out.’ ”

Putting Ungar’s prowess in perspective, Mr. Dalla, who serves as the media director for the World Series, pointed out that Ungar won 10 out of the 30 major events he entered, despite losing many of his prime years to drug use. This is a “staggering” record, he said. “There have been people who won more than 10 $10,000 majors, but that’s spread over 20 years, over literally hundreds of tournaments.”

But for those playing in Ungar’s wake, his self-destruction remains an indelible part of his allure. “He’s a legend,” said Shane Schleger, a 28-year-old player from New York City, taking a cigarette break between games. “The type of personality that’s drawn to the lifestyle is bound to have a lot of vice in his life. I’m no stranger to that.”

“Let’s just say,” he added, “Stuey died for all of our sins.”

STUART ERROL UNGAR was born on Sept. 8, 1953, in Lower Manhattan. His father, Isidore Ungar, ran a bar but made his real money booking bets on sports.

When Stuey was still in elementary school, he was recruited to keep the tally sheets. He learned cards – mostly what not to do – staring over his mother’s shoulder at Sunday night poker games at summer resorts in the Catskills. By the time he was 10, he was telling her how to play.

It turned out the young Ungar had a knack for almost every card game he tried, and at the age of 15 he dropped out of high school to play gin, often earning up to $500 in a game at various card clubs. It was at one such club that he met a sultry blond cocktail waitress named Madeline Wheeler. Standing 5-foot-5 and dressed in the garish polyester of a 50-year-old Brooklyn underboss, Ungar was hardly an ideal suitor, but his doggedness and charisma eventually won him a date – after a year. They married in 1982.

“I knew what I was getting into,” Ms. Ungar, now 52, recalled in early June over lunch at Caesars Palace, where she works at a fashion boutique. “I knew it was always going to be the cards.”

At that point in Ungar’s gambling career poker was still a side interest. Gin was his game, and his skills seemed to border on magic, friends recall. But he was a flop as a hustler, humiliating one player after another. “They’d crumble right in front of my eyes,” he said to Mr. Dalla. “They’d have this look in their eyes like they realized they couldn’t win. It was – beautiful.”

Before long he found it impossible to get a game. So on a spring day in 1978, he turned up at the highest stakes poker game in Las Vegas at the time, the no-limit Texas hold ‘em game at the Dunes casino, tossing a bundle of bills worth $20,000 on the table. It was gone in less than 15 minutes, his biography recounts. But at the end of 36 hours Ungar had won back that sum, plus another $27,000.

By 1980, when Ungar won his first World Series, taking home $365,000, he was living in Las Vegas with Madeline and her son, Richard Wheeler, from a brief marriage when she was 18. As a husband he had serious shortcomings, Madeline Ungar said. He would disappear for days at a time, playing cards and chasing women.

Meanwhile the basic rituals of daily life remained a mystery. He never opened a bank account, Ms. Ungar said, and shopped for his groceries at 7-Eleven.

“Back when he had two or three million dollars in his pocket, they turned his lights off because he wouldn’t pay the bills,” Mr. Sexton said.

High stakes gamblers as a breed have a curious relationship with money. (How else could you push in $20,000 on a bluff?) But to Ungar, those who knew him say, money meant nothing, except as a means to keep score.

Mickey Appleman, another player from New York who knew Ungar well, said he always kept a short mental list of the “the real ‘action’ people in Vegas.” These were the thrill-seeking gamblers who “didn’t think about I.R.A.’s or that nonsense other people think about.” Mr. Appleman included himself on the list, but Ungar, he said, “was off the charts.”

At a Starbucks off Sahara Avenue, Ungar’s daughter Stefanie, who is 22 and describes herself as a Christian, is studying to be a psychologist. She recently recalled that he would tip a waiter $100 on a $50 tab. “He would tip a busboy just coming to clean his plate $20,” she said. He bought, and lost, Tudor-style houses and Jaguars.

“He just had too much gamble in him,” said Mr. Sexton, who said that Ungar would win tens of thousands of dollars at poker, a game where he was a world-class player, then blow it all on dog racing, a sport about which he knew nothing.

“He was the best winning poker player I ever saw, and he was one of the worst losing poker players I ever saw,” said a drawling Doyle Brunson, 71, a poker legend.

Ungar was volatile to begin with, but his flirtation with cocaine, which steadily grew into a profound addiction over the course of the 1980′s, proved ruinous, friends say. He and Madeline divorced in 1986; Ungar continued to slide.

IN 1990, according to his biography, Ungar’s friend Billy Baxter, also a top player, put up $10,000 to get Ungar into World Series. After going up $70,000, Ungar failed to show on the third day and was found unconscious, in his underwear, on the floor of his room. He never returned to the table during the tournament, but his early success earned him a ninth-place finish and a prize of $20,050.

As the gambling industry turned increasingly corporate, other top players found ways to leverage their skills. Bobby Baldwin worked for Steve Wynn, the casino operator, as a top executive. Mr. Sexton became a commentator for the World Poker Tour. Mr. Brunson and others launched online poker rooms. Ungar, meanwhile, continued to drift.

Then in 1997, wearing a pair of round, blue-tinted sunglasses (“to hide the fact that his nostrils had collapsed from cocaine,” Mr. Alson explained) and looking like “a homeless man,” according to Mr. Dalla, who was there, Ungar sat down to play at the World Series and went home with the $1 million first prize. Mr. Dalla said that the winnings, which were split with Ungar’s backer Mr. Baxter, were gone within four months.

At that point Ungar’s daughter, who often spoke to him five times a day, said she told him “I’m not even going to pick up my phone until I see Mountain Vista – that’s a rehab center out here – on my caller ID.”

A few days after that conversation, Stu Ungar was found dead from a heart attack, alone, in bed in a motel at the far end of the Strip. He had $800 in cash. And though he was known for ingesting huge quantities of drugs, the coroner found only trace amounts in his system. A housekeeper had seen him in bed, shivering, the day before.

Ungar’s short, fast life already inspired one film, the little-seen “Stuey,” starring Michael Imperioli, in 2003. Last week Graham King, a British film producer who backed “The Aviator” and “Traffic,” bought the rights to “One of a Kind.” If Ungar were still alive, friends say, he would hardly be surprised to see his life turning into Hollywood myth. In fact he expected it.

He had only one problem, Mike Sexton recalled: “Stuey always said, ‘Yeah, but who is good-looking enough to play me?’ ”

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June 25, 2005
Guidant Says Flaw Is Found in More Types of Heart Units
By BARRY MEIER

The Guidant Corporation, already under scrutiny for delaying disclosures about flawed products, urged doctors yesterday to stop implanting its most sophisticated heart devices because of a fault that might cause some of the 40,000 units already implanted not to work properly.

The move could have significant financial consequences for Guidant because it affects, for now, sales of many of the company’s heart devices in the fastest-growing part of the market: advanced defibrillators that also act as pacemakers for both sides of the heart.

Yesterday, the company’s stock fell $4.70, or 6.85 percent, to $63.90 as investors grew nervous over the fate of Johnson & Johnson’s plan to acquire Guidant for $25.4 billion.

Analysts said they thought Johnson & Johnson would probably cut that price. They also said the deal’s planned closing in the third quarter of this year might be delayed. They added that the products involved in yesterday’s move appeared to account for a substantial percentage of Guidant’s defibrillator sales.

Both Johnson & Johnson and Guidant had no comment and declined to make their top executives available for interviews.

The flaw at issue in yesterday’s announcement involves a magnetic switch that becomes stuck in the off position. For patients, the flaw poses less of a risk than some defects affecting other Guidant devices, doctors said. However, they said users would have to see physicians so they could disable the problem component.

As proposed partners, Johnson & Johnson and Guidant have provided very different case studies of corporate responses to product problems.

Johnson & Johnson, based in New Brunswick, N.J., withdrew all bottles of its pain reliever, Tylenol, from store shelves in 1982 after reports of product tampering. The company won praise at the time for its quick response.

Guidant’s problems began in late May, when it was disclosed that the company, based in Indianapolis, had not told doctors for three years that one type of its defibrillators had repeatedly failed because of an electrical defect. A defibrillator emits an electrical jolt that shocks a chaotically beating heart back into rhythm.

Since then, the device maker has been buffeted by bad publicity because it has been forced to make repeated announcements about other device-related defects. Late last week, under pressure from the Food and Drug Administration, Guidant recalled 50,000 defibrillators, with thousands of them at risk of potentially short-circuiting just when needed to produce a life-saving shock.

“One thing that distinguishes this recall from others is the time gap from when it was discovered and when it was disclosed,” said Alexander Arrow, an industry analyst with Lazard. “It points to a corporate response that looks inappropriate, so that it potentially has more staying power on the reputational level.”

Yesterday’s announcement by Guidant affects several models: the Contak Renewal 3; Contak Renewal 4; Contak Renewal 3 and 4 AVT; and the Renewal RF. The company said it had received four reports of flawed switches among the 40,000 units implanted.

However, the financial impact on Guidant could be substantial, at least in the short term, because the affected models appear to involve many of the company’s advanced defibrillators. The use of such devices, which cost about $25,000 each, is growing rapidly in part because Medicare has greatly increased the number of older patients for whom it will pay for such devices. The units are used in patients who are at risk of cardiac arrest and have other heart problems.

Dr. Eric N. Prystowsky, a heart specialist at St. Vincent Hospital in Indianapolis and a Guidant consultant, said company officials alerted him late Thursday about yesterday’s announcement and told him they would pull back all affected units that had not been implanted, a number the company put at 6,000. As a result, he said, he would be using other companies’ units for the moment.

The company did not say how it planned to fix the problem, when it expected to do so or how it would fix units already implanted in patients. If a significant change must be made in the way units are made, the change could require F.D.A. approval before Guidant could make new units.

Dr. Prystowsky said that until the problem was fixed, Guidant technicians might have to be on hand when patients were prepared for surgery so the technicians could deal with the affected magnetic switch.

Guidant does not break out its sales by model types, but last year, defibrillator sales accounted for nearly 50 percent of its revenue of $3.8 billion. Analysts said they thought the types of models involved in yesterday’s alert, which are known as cardiac resynchronization therapy, or C.R.T., devices, made up 40 percent to 50 percent of its defibrillator sales.

C.R.T. devices are the fastest-growing part of the defibrillator market, which is expanding 20 percent annually. Guidant’s heart device division was a major attraction to Johnson & Johnson, which wants to expand its presence in the device business.

Joanne Wuensch, an industry analyst with Harris Nesbitt, said she believed that the financial effect of the latest alert on Guidant would be relatively short-lived. But she said she thought Johnson & Johnson would soon cut the price it was offering for Guidant. As it stands, that deal is valued at $76 a share to Guidant holders.

“We estimate it is going to be about $68 a share, or about 10 percent down,” she said. Mr. Arrow, the Lazard analyst, also downgraded Guidant on Monday.

Johnson & Johnson did not respond to a request to interview its chief executive, William C. Weldon. Guidant declined a request to interview its chief executive, Ronald W. Dollens. Guidant also would not say what percentage of its defibrillator sales were affected by the faulty switch.

While Guidant’s shares sank yesterday, shares of its two rivals, Medtronic and St. Jude Medical, both rose, apparently in anticipation that their market share would increase, at least in the short term. A Guidant spokeswoman said the company was “ramping up” manufacture of two other C.R.T. models, the Contak Renewal 1 and Contak Renewal 2.

Dr. Prystowsky said he thought the company had moved quickly yesterday to halt implants of any further devices with the flawed switch, given the controversy after it did not alert doctors to an electrical flaw in one model. In that case, a college student who had been implanted with one of the flawed units died in March, three years after Guidant discovered and fixed the problem.

“They said we have heard everyone loud and clear,” he said. “We are willing to take the economic hit.”

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Sun ‘n Fun

OLD SOLDIERS It took a decade to complete work on Glacier Girl a P-38 Lightning twin-engine fighter.

Rick Friedman for The New York Times

HOME REPAIRS A nearly restored PT-23A sits in Harland Avezzie’s garage. Mr. Avezzie has restored a number of warbirds

Courtesy of C. A. F. Minnesota Wing

A restored B-25J, left; the World War II plane was commonly known as the Mitchell Bomber

Sun ‘n Fun
CURATORS OF THE SKIES Aircraft restorers salvaged this World War II P-38 Lightning from the Greenland ice cap.

June 24, 2005
On Wings of Warbirds
By SARAH TUFF

SURE, the old muscle cars stashed in Harland Avezzie’s six-bay garage in Westfield, Mass., are pulse-quickening cool. But what really sets hearts soaring, among the lucky few who find this place, are the planes.

Or, at least, their skeletons. Hanging from the rafters is a frame of a World War II trainer, a PT-19, that is said to have been flown by Charles Lindbergh. “I haven’t been able to confirm anything yet,” says Mr. Avezzie, 51, who seems more excited about a husk of metal sitting on the floor: the crushed fuselage of a 1942 TBF-1 Avenger that was pulled from Lake Michigan 16 years ago – one of five known TBF’s left in the world. And if Mr. Avezzie finishes restoring the plane, it could be the only one flying.

Just when might that be? Mr. Avezzie wipes his hands on his jeans and looks around at the parts he has acquired so far: cylinders from a Boy Scout camp near Boston, wingtip lenses from New Zealand and landing gear from a barn in Pennsylvania. Then Mr. Avezzie gazes at the wingless bird with its crumpled nose bowl and laughs. “I’ve probably got 6,000 hours already,” he says. “And it still looks like a pile of junk.”

Of course, one man’s junk is another’s treasure, and for Mr. Avezzie and hundreds of other vintage military aircraft enthusiasts whose hobby has taken over their lives and living rooms, a plastic tub of hardware is as good as a chest of gold. These men, and a few women, are constantly on the lookout for World War II aircraft and other warplanes, all known as warbirds. They hunt for their loot in the middle of deserts, atop glaciers and on the sides of mountains. They spend years, even decades, painstakingly restoring the planes, rivet by rivet, to airworthy condition.

A project may begin with a hydraulic tank no bigger than a bread box that was plucked from the bottom of a lake in Uruguay and end 12 years later with a fully restored 1940′s P-51 Mustang that carries that tank. As children, almost all of the restorers built or flew model planes, and now they demonstrate the same patient precision on a much grander scale.

“To see a warbird preserved in a museum brings a sense of wonder,” said Bill Fischer, 45, executive director of the Experimental Aircraft Association’s Warbirds of America chapter, based in Oshkosh, Wis. “But to experience the presence of a warbird with all the senses is awe inspiring. To touch it, to see it in flight, to experience flight, to hear the roar of the engine is nothing short of exhilarating.”

IN 1966, Walt Ohlrich Jr., a career Naval officer, founded the Warbirds of America as a forum for discussing the delights and difficulties of restoring and operating World War II aircraft.

“I think of the people who sat in these cockpits before me,” said Captain Ohlrich, 76, who is retired but still flies a 1943 SNJ-5 trainer. “They may be strapped to their seats somewhere underwater in the Philippines, and this is a tribute to their courage and sacrifice. It may sound corny to high school kids these days, but I love to show it.”

Captain Ohlrich’s group has grown from a few dozen members in the mid-1960′s to more than 7,000, whose motto is “Keep ‘em Flying.” Aircraft now range from 1914 Jenny biplanes to Vietnam-era UH-34D Seahorse helicopters.

“Warbird owners and operators are motivated by many different things,” Mr. Fischer said. “Some are simply ex-military pilots who are continuing their flying adventures.”

A handful of women are active Warbirders, too. Connie Bowlin of Douglas, Ga., for example, flies the Liberty Belle – a recently restored B-17 Flying Fortress – a P-51 and other warbirds. “It’s a really great opportunity,” said Mrs. Bowlin, 55, “and so much fun for me to fly them and to pay tribute to the guys who flew them in World War II.”

Jim Jansa, 71, of Fort Walton Beach, Fla., was determined to continue his adventures in the very 1943 PT-23 trainer he flew at Plattsburgh, N.Y., in the 1950′s. He found the plane in Middlebury, Vt., in 1960 and started a flyover advertising business. He subsequently sold the PT-23 to a friend with whom he lost touch. “I didn’t think I’d ever get it back,” said Mr. Jansa, a former Air Force pilot and vocational school principal. “But I wanted it back. I regretted that I ever sold it.”

In 2000, Mr. Jansa used the Internet to track down his friend, who still had the PT-23 but said that he felt too old to restore it. Mr. Jansa drove to Storrs, Conn., stuffed the plane in a rental truck and spent four years and $35,000 stripping, cleaning, varnishing and painting it.

“I’ve been on Cloud 9,” said Mr. Jansa, who flew the PT-23 for the first time in 40 years in November 2004. “I love it, the open cockpit, the old fun of winding up the starter, looking at the engine, the propeller going by you. It’s real.”

The Internet has made life a little easier for restorers. On eBay, Mr. Avezzie discovered a crucial and rare part for the Avenger: a brand-new drift sight – a navigation tool – still resting in its box with the Navy tag. On www.barnstormers.com, there are B-24 Liberator engine mounts and cowling sections; P-51 Mustang air filters and magnetos; and a Polish MIG-17F, selling for $160,000. Other sites, including www.warbirdalley.com and www.warbirdregistry.org, help track the history and whereabouts of hundreds of classic military aircraft.

Still, there are no better places to look for planes and the people who restore them than air shows, which are increasingly tailored to distinct categories, including warbirds. On May 7, at the Chippewa Valley Regional Airport in Eau Claire, Wis., a B-25J, a k a the Miss Mitchell, and an SNJ-4 trainer flew in for a V-E Day celebration; that night, partygoers in Navy, nursing and R.A.F. uniforms danced to Glenn Miller tunes and other Big Band songs played by a jazz ensemble.


MEANWHILE, the big events, like the Experimental Aircraft Association’s AirVenture in Oshkosh each summer (July 25 to 31 this year), transform fields of green to seas of steel, where a continuous soundtrack of roaring engines, purring propellers and a booming public address systems accompanies the spine-tingling sight of planes rising, falling, looping and gliding, seemingly within inches of one another.

At the Sun ‘n Fun air show in Lakeland, Fla., in mid-April, Kenny Loggins’s “Danger Zone,” the anthem from the movie “Top Gun,” thundered through the loudspeakers as vendors sold funnel cakes and shakes. Clusters of children gathered around Glacier Girl, a P-38 Lightning a twin-engine World War II fighter recovered in 1992 from the Greenland ice cap and finally restored a decade later. “We thought it was going to take 18 months to fix it up,” said the project manager, Bob Cardin, 58, who moved to Middlesboro, Ky., the home of Glacier Girl and its sponsor, Roy Shoffner, 77. “You just do it one day at a time – now, every time I see the plane fly, I’m just in awe.”

Glacier Girl’s only pilot is Steve Hinton, 53, an air racer, movie pilot and president of the Planes of Fame Museum in Chino, Calif. The first plane in which he was a passenger, at age 15, was an AT-6 trainer; four years later, he’d learned to fly one, and now he has accumulated more than 7,500 hours in warbirds. When Mr. Hinton flies Glacier Girl at Sun ‘n Fun, he cuts it close, buzzing the crowd at some 375 miles an hour. (“He’s honking,” said Mr. Cardin, watching and whistling through his teeth.)

But while Mr. Hinton has had a few accidents, including a 1979 crash at the Reno Air Races, he says he isn’t living on the edge in his profession. “I’m not a thrill seeker,” he said. “I’ve done a lot of thrilling things, but I’ve always tended to try to do it properly and correctly.”

The Federal Aviation Administration governs participation by warbirds in air shows. After a pilot and a passenger were killed in the crash of a T-34 trainer in Texas last December, the F.A.A. effectively grounded those planes until April, when it set guidelines that included inspection requirements and restrictions on speeds and flight hours. But for the most part, ensuring the safety of warbirds – like any other civil aircraft – is largely left to the owners and operators.

Pete Jacobs, 68, a retired pilot who lives in a fly-in community in Daytona Beach, Fla., takes joy rides in a 1982 Aero Vodochody L-39 – a Czechoslovak jet trainer – at 400 miles an hour. He rarely brings passengers; the ejection seats are so tricky that only his is wired. “If I do take someone, they understand my seat’s hot, theirs is not,” he said. “If we have got to get out, they’re on their own.”

He might consider asking the brave souls who climb into his vehicle to pitch in for gas money. Though L-39′s are relatively cheap in the aviation world – $190,000 to $400,000 – they burn two and a half gallons of jet fuel a minute at $2.50 to $4.50 a gallon.

“You have got to have a hole in your head to want an ex-jet fighter,” said Bill Austin, 50, a Tennessee dealer of Eastern European propeller-driven Yak-52 trainers. “But I guess there’s a little Walter Mitty in all of us.”

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Chris Hondros/Getty Images

Marines processed a detained man near Falluja, Iraq, Friday. Falluja had been relatively quiet since November until about a week ago.

June 25, 2005
Iraq Bombing Kills 4 U.S. Women, a Record Toll
By JAMES GLANZ and JOHN F. BURNS

This article was reported by James Glanz, John F. Burns and Eric Schmitt and written by Mr. Glanz and Mr. Burns.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 24 – At least four women serving in the American military, including three marines, are among the six known dead in a suicide car bombing in Falluja on Thursday, military officials in Baghdad and Washington said Friday.

It was the largest number of women in the armed services killed in a single attack during the Iraq war. Eleven women were also among the 13 marines wounded in the strike, which began when the car approached a military convoy carrying about 20 marines and sailors to checkpoint duties on the edge of Falluja. Most if not all of the personnel riding in the back of the truck when it was hit were American women assigned to search Iraqi women who pass through the checkpoint.

Of about 37 women in the military killed in Iraq as of Wednesday – among at least 1,728 service members killed over all – nearly all had died within units made up largely of men. On Thursday, for the first time in the war, a large number of women suffered and died together after a strike that military officials suspect was carefully planned and might have been aimed at the women.

The attack came in the middle of a debate over the proper role of women in the United States military. Although women are not supposed to be used in combat roles, the Iraq war is a conflict without a defined front line, where attacks can come from any direction, at any time. Women who drive in logistics convoys or serve as engineers are every day at risk of ambush, suicide bombings and remotely detonated explosives.

Given those realities, commanders have quietly relaxed the rules to allow women to be deployed as turret gunners in Humvees and in a wide array of other assignments that put them in the line of fire.

“Among marines in the field, the gender lines have already been erased,” one male senior officer said. “You can’t go to Iraq and not be at risk in some way, and that’s what all of us who put on a uniform here understand.”

This month, Congress voted down a proposal that would have put into law a set of prohibitions on the assignment of women to units that can involve them in combat. But as recently as Thursday, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the supreme American commander in Iraq, argued before the House Armed Services Committee that the official military policy not to have women serve in infantry units should remain in place.

Women serving in Iraq widely support relaxing those prohibitions, but after Thursday’s attack, one marine officer predicted that the deaths would add further momentum to the debate in Congress, among women’s groups and elsewhere.

Before Friday, there appeared to have been only one case in which more than one woman was killed in a single hostile incident, a helicopter crash near Falluja in early November 2003 that killed two women, Pfc. Karina S. Lau and Specialist Frances M. Vega, both of the Army, out of an overall death toll of 16. The names of those killed in the attack on Thursday were being withheld until families could be notified.

The horrific power of the blast, sending metal shards and body parts in all directions, and a huge cloud of black smoke and swirling dust climbing into the evening sky, led to some uncertainty about the final toll. The American command issued a preliminary statement on Friday saying that two members of the Second Marine Expeditionary Force were killed and 13 were wounded.

But the statement added that three marines and a sailor were still officially classified as Duty Status Whereabouts Unknown – in essence, missing and unaccounted for in the carnage until forensic tests can firmly establish their identities. The military officials in Baghdad and Washington, who said the missing were presumed dead, cautioned that the casualty toll could still change owing to the chaotic nature of the scene.

Among the men killed was Cpl. Chad Powell, 22, of Ouachita Parish, La., according to his father, Jerry Powell. Corporal Powell was a member of a marine motor transport unit. “They said the suicide bomber hit the vehicle and it exploded on impact, and that he was probably killed instantly,” his father said.

Corporal Powell, who was married with a 3-year-old son, was planning to leave the Marine Corps in three months, when his four-year enlistment expired, and move home to Louisiana, his father said. “He was genuine. He was honest, and he was a godly man,” Mr. Powell said. “As far as I know, he didn’t have any enemies.”

The attack came on top of a series of similarly devastating bombing attacks on marines in Anbar Province, west of Baghdad in recent weeks, including two in the past month in which five or more marines died in each. At least 17 marines have been killed in the province in the past 10 days alone, and several hundred since the American-led invasion two years ago.

But the gloom that settled on the American command Friday as details of the latest attack became known took on a special edge because of the predominance of women among the victims, a rare event not only in this war but in any other American war.

The attack is also likely to be seen as a significant setback for a city that American-led forces invaded in November to drive out the insurgents who had taken control. Months earlier, Falluja had become the focus of American ire when four Americans working for a private security company were ambushed and killed, with their mutilated bodies strung up on a bridge on the western end of town.

Under a heavy security lockdown since the November campaign, Falluja had been relatively quiet until about a week ago, when a car bomb exploded outside a building where a political meeting was taking place. American commanders believe that insurgents are trying to work their way back into Falluja.

The latest Falluja attack took place on the main east-west road through town, known as Highway 10, about 400 yards west of the main checkpoint on the city’s eastern edge. On Friday morning, tires from the truck – a standard seven-ton transport vehicle – and pieces of metal from the car used in the attack still littered the cracked asphalt of the road.

A witness to the bombing, Muhammad Anwar, said that the car approached an American military convoy from the side and swerved toward the truck, which was visibly packed with military personnel.

The women had an important role in Falluja, because in Iraq the American practice has been to assign only women to pat down women and girls passing in and out of the city. The girls going through the checkpoints often appear afraid, so the American women requested donations of teddy bears to give them. They recently arrived from the United States.

James Glanz and John F. Burns reported from Baghdad for this article, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

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