That was the prayer of Bill Clinton fans everywhere when the ex-President checked into New York-Presbyterian Hospital Columbia – leaving it momentarily unclear when and whether Elvis would leave the building.

He did, of course, the next morning, with all his usual rock-star swagger and a couple of new stents in his famously large, cheeseburger-loving heart.

Beyond the expressions of goodwill that streamed in was another reality.

Clinton wasn’t the only person who had to suddenly face mortality – so did a generation of baby-boomers for whom Clinton is like a living mirror.

For those born in the two decades or so after World War II – Clinton came along in August 1946, almost exactly a year after America dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan to end the war – Clinton inhabits a unique place.

He’s not just another President. He is one of them.

Bubba boom: Former president Bill Clinton offers a lesson in mortality for baby-boomer generation.

Jeff Ondash, who sought the squeezes under the costumed alter ego Teddy McHuggin, broke the record Saturday night outside the Paris Las Vegas hotel-casino on the Las Vegas Strip.

Ondash says he hoped to become the world’s hugging champion to raise money for the American Heart Association during American Heart month. Ondash says the cause is important to him because his brother and father both died because of heart problems.

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR SALON: All Salon – Salon.com.

Clinton entered the hospital around noon, underwent surgery to open his arteries, and within hours his counselor and closest aide Douglas Band had released a statement indicating that the former president would soon return to work at the Clinton Foundation and as U.N. Special Envoy to Haiti. Based on his past record, there is little reason to doubt that promise. His cardiologist Alan Schwartz told the press on Thursday evening that his patient had already gotten up and walked around in the hospital, and that he could be expected to resume his “very active lifestyle.” According to the cardiologist, that lifestyle did not cause the chest discomfort that sent him back to the hospital.

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR SALON: Joe Conason – Salon.com.

Fifty years ago, things were different. The stores along Fifth — specifically, their lunch counters — and the city itself were the site of a battle that also played out in dozens of other cities in the South.

The fight pitted black college students and a few of their white peers against the city’s white power structure and its downtown merchants over the right to sit down and eat lunch. At the time, blacks could spend money in those stores but couldn’t eat at the stores’ lunch counters.

The lunch counter of 1960 was the equivalent of fast-food restaurants today. Hamburger chains were just beginning to appear on the American landscape. Ray Kroc had opened his first McDonald’s about five years earlier; Burger King had gone national just the year before. People wanting a sandwich or a hamburger popped over to the lunch counter of department stores, drugstores and five-and-dime stores to have a bite.

Except black people.

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR USA TODAY: Sit-ins reignited the civil rights movement 50 years ago – USATODAY.com.

Anyone who has seen the celebrated 1973 film “Serpico” knows that he often dressed up — bum, butcher, rabbi — to catch criminals. His off-duty look was never vintage cop either, with the bushy beard and the beads.

This is the man whose long and loud complaining about widespread corruption in the New York Police Department made him a pariah on the force. The patrolman shot in the face during a 1971 drug bust while screaming for backup from his fellow officers, who then failed to immediately call for an ambulance. The undaunted whistle-blower whose testimony was the centerpiece of the Knapp Commission hearings, which sparked the biggest shakeup in the history of the department.

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES: Frank Serpico, Police Officer Played by Al Pacino, Looks Back – NYTimes.com.

The poor weather and tight security could not dampen the otherwise festive mood in midtown Manhattan, where the cast of the Broadway show “Hair” was among the acts to perform. People wearing oversized 2010 glasses rushed to grab hats proclaiming “Happy New Year” that were tossed into the crowd. But the mood of the times was perhaps best embodied by the famous ball that dropped at midnight in Times Square – which was “more energy efficient than ever before,” organizers boasted, with its 32,256 Philips Luxeon Rebel LEDs and covered in 2,688 Waterford crystals.

The celebration followed spirited festivities elsewhere. In Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, about 2 million people, most of them dressed in traditional white, gathered at Copacabana Beach. In Hyderabad, Pakistan, the street was dotted with little white lights, emanating from candles that peace marchers were holding. In Venice, a high tide that flooded low-lying parts of the city, including St. Mark’s Square, coincided with the midnight celebration.

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE, CLICK THIS LINK TO THE NEW YORK TIMES: Celebrations in Times Square Despite Troubled Times – NYTimes.com.

“It was like being in jail,” Mr. Brown said on a recent afternoon. “In the nursing home you’ve got to do what they say when they say it, go to bed when they tell you, eat what they want you to eat. The food was terrible.”

But recently state workers helped Mr. Brown find a two-bedroom apartment in public housing here, which he shares with his daughter. “It just makes me more relaxed, more confident in myself,” he said, speaking with some difficulty, but with a broad smile. “More confident in the future.”

A growing number of states are reaching out to people like Mr. Brown, who have been in nursing homes for more than six months, aiming to disprove the notion that once people have settled into a nursing home, they will be there forever. Since 2007, Medicaid has teamed up with 29 states to finance such programs, enabling the low-income elderly and people with disabilities to receive many services in their own homes.

The program in Pennsylvania provides up to $4,000 in moving expenses, including a furniture allowance and modifications to the apartment, and Mr. Brown has a home health aide every morning and a care manager to arrange for services like physical therapy. The new programs, financed largely by $1.75 billion from Medicaid, are a sharp departure from past practices, where Medicaid practically steered people into nursing homes.

“Medicaid has had an institutional bias in favor of nursing homes,” even for people who do not need them, said Gene Coffey, a staff lawyer at the nonprofit National Senior Citizens Law Center. “Federal law requires states to provide nursing home services. They don’t have to provide home or community-based services.”

For Mr. Brown, the transition to his own home has changed his life, he said. Now, with his motorized wheelchair, he travels the city on public buses, visiting friends in other neighborhoods.

“It’s a great feeling,” he said. “In the nursing home I got up at 5 o’clock in the morning, then the rest of the day was just watching the TV or my VCR. I wanted to be able to get out and see people, see the world. I didn’t want to be confined. Now I go where I want to go.”

States and the federal government hope to save money, though research about cost savings has so far been inconclusive. A recent study by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, found that home care costs taxpayers $44,000 a year less than a nursing home stay — though this number cannot be used to estimate total savings, because often home-based services replace family care, not nursing home care.

About 1.5 million Americans are living in nursing homes.

“It’s amazing how quickly people can end up in a nursing home,” said Jean Janik, the director of community living options at the nonprofit Philadelphia Corporation for Aging. “Say you’re a single man and have a stroke, and need to go into a nursing home to rehab. You’re elderly so you don’t quite bounce back quickly. After 60 days, Medicare doesn’t pay any longer, so you need a Medicaid grant to stay in the nursing home. Then your Social Security will go to the nursing home.”

Many lose their apartments and regular support from family members, Ms. Janik said.

“We meet people who say, ‘I went to the hospital and next thing I know, here I am. I don’t know what happened to my apartment.’ ” Ms. Janik added, “We go and check, and it’s not in their name. Especially if they don’t have a strong family support system in place. A lot of people just think, Uncle Joe fell and broke his hip and now he’s in a nursing home, so be it, that’s where he’ll be. People don’t realize they can get services in their home.”

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS STORY, CLICK THIS LINK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES: Helping Elderly Leave Nursing Homes for a Home – NYTimes.com.

And once, he had told them, he sang as the cantor in a Jewish prayer service on the battlefield.

On Oct. 29, 1944, at the edge of a fierce fight for control of the city of Aachen, Germany, a correspondent for NBC radio introduced the modest Sabbath service like this:

“We bring you now a special broadcast of historic significance: The first Jewish religious service broadcast from Germany since the advent of Hitler.”

Mr. Fuchs, now 87 and living on the Upper West Side, was 22 that day at Aachen.

“I was just as much scared as anyone else,” he said in an interview in his Manhattan apartment. “But since I was the only one who could do it, I tried my best.”

Well-known in its time, the battlefield service became lost in obscurity, where it might have remained except for an archivist’s chance find and then, fast forward, unlikely fame on YouTube — where the 1944 service has drawn 310,000 hits — for Mr. Fuchs.

His grandchildren have been beside themselves with pride, relatives say, and the rabbi at Congregation Ramath Orah on West 110th Street, where Mr. Fuchs and his wife worship, is insisting that he sing at services on Saturday, which is Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year — though Mr. Fuchs says his voice is not what it used to be.

His performance on that 1944 broadcast, heard throughout the United States and later in Germany, however, brought a special poignancy to the 10-minute open-air service — partly because of his well-trained, stately voice, partly because a few seconds before he began the traditional “Yigdal” hymn, and for the three minutes it took to finish it, the crack of artillery shells exploding nearby could be heard clearly in the background.

A private first class in the First Infantry Division, Mr. Fuchs volunteered to sing that day because there was no cantor available. In fact, Mr. Fuchs had been studying to become a cantor, when the war broke out. But he had left his studies and was drafted, and never considered the chaplaincy.

His parents emigrated from Poland in 1934, when he was 12. Some of his aunts, uncles and cousins who remained were killed after the German invasion in 1939, he said in the interview. He wanted to fight the Nazis.

For 20 years afterward, Mr. Fuchs said, he suffered recurring nightmares about the war. He tried not to think about it too much.

He married Naomi Groob, they had five children, he worked in the diamond district and served as a cantor at the Bayside Jewish Center in Queens.

When his children were growing up, there was a photograph on the wall of their living room in Bayside, showing him with a prayer shawl over his Army uniform, singing while a radio reporter held a microphone in front of him.

Of the picture, “He would say, ‘Yeah, that was when I did the service. They recorded it. It was on the radio,’ ” recalled his daughter, Ester R. Fuchs, now a professor of public affairs and political science at Columbia.

But that was all he said. And deferring to his reticence, his wife never said more.

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS STORY, AND MORE STORIES OF HUMAN INTEREST, CLICK THE FOLLOWING LINK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES:  During World War II, a Soldier Turned Cantor on the Battlefield – NYTimes.com.

With the economy tanking, lots of people are striking out on their own. Some never thought of starting a business until they got laid off. Others kicked around the idea but never found the time or the passion to pursue it. Now, launching a start-up seems like a better bet than taking on an endless job hunt.

Call them entrepreneurs by necessity. And while some of them have waited years preparing for just this moment, others may not be quite so ready or eager to make the move.

“I think we’re going to see a lot of businesses started by people who otherwise would not have started businesses” in better times, says Bo Fishback, vice president of entrepreneurship for the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a Kansas City entrepreneurial-research organization. “Necessity-driven entrepreneurship can be a powerful motivator.”

This new crowd faces lots of obstacles. Banks and investors are handing out a lot less money these days, especially to first-timers. What’s more, necessity entrepreneurs have often done less of the spade work than other entrepreneurs—in part because they weren’t thinking that a layoff was imminent. And the fragile economy makes just about any new company a chancy proposition.

So, how are these new entrepreneurs faring? To get a sense of it, we talked to five people who recently started—or tried to start—new ventures because their job picture changed. We found that they often had to struggle to find their footing and adjust to the demands of entrepreneurship. But most also found an unexpected passion for flying solo.

Here are their stories.

A FORCED BLESSING:

Aynsley Deluce didn’t want to leave her job as director of insight and strategy for a Toronto ad agency. But in November, the firm announced restructuring plans—and axed her position.

“In a way, it was a forced blessing,” says the 32-year-old Ms. Deluce. “That’s because they forced me into doing something I wouldn’t have done otherwise. I didn’t have the nerve.”

For about six years, she had been kicking around an idea with her now-husband: a Web site that tracked parking spots for rent in urban areas. They got the idea while chatting about parking gripes over dinner one night with friends, and the next morning went online and secured the domain name, Parkingspots.com.

But then they sat on the idea until last year. Ms. Deluce’s husband, Matthew Ball, plunged into the work full time, but Ms. Deluce procrastinated about making the same commitment; instead she spent evenings and weekends on public-relations and marketing initiatives.

“It’s a scary jump to take the risk to leave a full-time job,” Ms. Deluce says.

Then came the layoff, which forced her to focus on the nascent business. And she found that it had a steep learning curve.

Ms. Deluce and Mr. Ball didn’t have any knowledge about the parking business, so she has joined forums and associations, meeting everyone she can. Financing has also been tough. The couple approached banks and other traditional sources but found few willing to lend—and those that would insisted on tough terms. So, the two have relied on friends and family, as well as government grants.

Another problem was more personal: finding enough self-discipline. “There’s no one telling you what to do anymore,” Ms. Deluce says. “There’s no one telling you to get out of bed at a good hour.…You’ve got to spend your heart and soul into it. You’re now your own boss.”

Revenue from the site hasn’t met Ms. Deluce’s early expectations. But she now thinks that those hopes were unrealistic, and the site has shown strong growth in other ways, expanding its network to 30 cities.

“In retrospect, 13 months in, I’d say that I’m really proud of how far we’ve come and that we are exactly where I’d want to be,” she says.

Ms. Deluce adds that she has no intention of giving up entrepreneurship. “I’m not going back to being a full-time employee,” she says. “I’m working full time now, for me. It may sound selfish, but I’d rather do something for me and build my company than helping someone else build theirs.”

BIG PLANS ON HOLD

Jim Garrett loves riding and fixing up English motorcycles. So, when the 53-year-old, of Ingleside on the Bay, Texas, took a buyout from his job in April of last year, he decided to use his severance money to pursue his dream of starting a motorcycle-restoration business.

The alumina refinery where he’d worked for eight years paid him $18,000 in severance and dangled an additional $10,000 in seed money for his business if he completed an entrepreneurship-training class. The class shepherded him through steps such as market research, registering the business with the state and preparing marketing material.

To build up a list of potential clients, Mr. Garrett reached out to motorcyclist acquaintances and attended motorcycle rallies to meet other riders. He found about 35 people who expressed an interest in having their motorcycles restored. His research also showed him that he had lots of room to grow: There were 33,000 classic English motorcycles registered in the state of Texas.

So, he moved forward with his plans. He estimates he invested about $20,000, including purchasing a prefabricated metal building that he could move onto his property to use as a workshop. He also spoke with a loan officer at a credit union in San Antonio and prepared to submit a loan application for his new business.

But come September, the business climate suddenly darkened: The stock market tanked, and many people told Mr. Garrett they could no longer afford to purchase his services. A friend who was going to help Mr. Garrett power-coat his cycles suddenly closed his own business due to lackluster demand. “It was something I was looking forward to doing, but all of a sudden everything started dropping,” he says. “Everything was just crumbling at once.”

Since then, Mr. Garrett has worked at a couple of jobs. He’s holding onto the equipment and building he purchased but won’t start his company unless the economy improves. “I’m going to wait and see what the stock market does,” he says.

A FLASH OF INSPIRATION

Adam Etrheim had long worked in the home-building and remodeling industry—a lucrative field when the housing market boomed a few years ago. But after it began collapsing in mid-2007, he could no longer make a livable income, and took a job selling cars at a dealership.

While working full time, Mr. Etrheim, of Onalaska, Wis., got the idea of building a Web site where consumers could solicit bids from contractors and where general contractors could solicit bids from subcontractors.

A Web site, Mr. Etrheim figured, would simplify a traditionally nettlesome process and allow subcontractors to find jobs that they wouldn’t otherwise know about.

In late 2007, Mr. Etrheim started working with the small-business development center at a local university to build his business plan and buy up domain names. A counselor at the center also connected him with a local angel investor group.

One night in February 2008, Mr. Etrheim pitched the group on his plan for eContractorBids.com and asked for $200,000 to cover start-up costs. Four hours later, one angel called him and said that six of the group’s members would collectively give him the money. Mr. Etrheim quit his job the next day.

“Once they said, ‘This is such a good idea that we want to put our money in it,’ that was the day I thought, wow, I’m really onto something,” the 28-year-old Mr. Etrheim says.

He spent the next several months working on the site, investing $50,000 of his personal savings, along with $150,000 in bank financing. But growing the business was much harder than he expected, mostly given contractors’ reluctance to use the Internet. Over the first six months, only about 50 signed up for subscriptions to the site; Mr. Etrheim had figured he’d get triple that number.

Mr. Etrheim says things are looking brighter in recent weeks as more contractors who are hard pressed to find work realize the Internet can help them. The site currently has about 190 paying subscribers, and Mr. Etrheim just secured another $200,000 of angel financing.

What’s more, the company, which has six employees, recently sold a franchise in Minnesota and another in Wisconsin for $20,000 each, and is currently talking with other potential franchisees.

Mr. Etrheim is optimistic that the company will be churning a profit by summer, but recognizes there are still many challenges ahead. “This is a high-risk operation in a struggling industry,” Mr. Etrheim says.

A HOBBY PAYS OFF

Jessi Walter was a Wall Street wunderkind. At 21, with a degree in economics from Harvard, she was hired by Bear Stearns Cos., and eventually rose to the position of vice president in credit strategy.

But the J.P. Morgan merger last summer ended her career. “They just didn’t need me,” says Ms. Walter, now 27 years old.

So, she took a couple of months to “make sense of the whole situation,” and realized that she could turn one of her hobbies—cooking with her boyfriend’s nieces, and arranging birthday parties for them—into a business. In September, she used her savings to launch Cupcake Kids LLC, which teaches kids to cook and bake, everything from pizza and lasagna to pastries and cakes.

So far, the business has been busy and profitable; Ms. Walter has even hired a dozen teachers part time to help her. For the most part, she has relied on word of mouth for her marketing. Ms. Walter also got a boost recently when her business was featured in New York magazine’s “Best of New York” list.

Ms. Walter says she wouldn’t have considered going out on her own if it hadn’t been for the layoff. It was “forced decision making,” she says.

And it hasn’t always been the smoothest transition for her to make. “When you work for a big company, you do your job,” Ms. Walter says. “When you’re an entrepreneur, you have to do everything,” from writing the business plan to taking out the trash. “There’s not enough hours of the day” to do the work.

But “I’m 100% enjoying what I’m doing now,” Ms. Walter explains. “I love developing a business, and I’m really passionate and fulfilled by what I’m doing. I’d never like to say never to options in life, but for now, going back to Wall Street is not something that I’m considering.”

OUT OF THE BLUE

Tarah Cranford, of San Francisco, knew her ad-agency job wasn’t safe. Clients weren’t renewing their contracts, no new business was coming in, and her workload as a public-relations officer was light. Plus, she was low on the totem pole, since she’d only been there for a year.

When the ax finally fell in mid-December, Ms. Cranford regretted not starting her job search earlier. Days turned into weeks as she tried to get an interview.

And then an unexpected opportunity fell into her lap. She got a bunch of inquiries about a sideline she dabbled in occasionally: photography.

“When I got laid off, I didn’t really expect to start my photography business full time,” says the 28-year-old Ms. Cranford, who studied photography at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. But when she got the inquiries, “a light went off when this happened. This was it. This was what I’m going to do. Ever since then, I’ve been working nonstop.”

Her first step was to revamp a Web site she had set up, TarahPhotography.com, to make it more professional. She also had to make some big adjustments to her own style.

For one thing, she learned to stop being passive with clients. At first, when people asked about a job, she would say, “Just let me know when you’d like to do this.” But they often wouldn’t call back. Now she says, “When do you want to do this? How about Sunday?”

Ms. Cranford also had to get used to the lack of structure or accountability that came along with striking out on her own.

“If I want, I can roll out of bed and work in my PJs till noon, but I think it’s important to create a schedule that keeps you on target,” she says. “Otherwise, you’ll waste an entire day running errands, or working in front of your computer till evening with rollers in your hair.”

Then there’s marketing. Ms. Cranford had to build a reputation in an area with tons of photographers. So, she hired a specialist to help her make her Web site more appealing to search engines. She says the move doubled her Web traffic to more than 3,000 unique visitors monthly.

Although Ms. Cranford is turning a tiny profit, she says she’s always worried about the future. “Are the calls going to keep coming in, or is this it?” she asks. “It’s kind of unnerving to not know.” Ms. Spors, a staff reporter of The Wall Street Journal in Minneapolis, can be reached at kelly.spors@wsj.com. Mr. Flandez, a Journal staff reporter in New York, can be reached at raymund.flandez@wsj.com.  For more news and information, click the link below for the Wall Street Journal.  The Wall Street Journal is the leading name in financial news.

Please share your stories with us below.

Starting Over as an Entrepreneur

She was the history major and Puerto Rican student activist at Princeton who spent her first year at that bastion of the Ivy League “too intimidated to ask questions.” She was the tough-minded New York City prosecutor, and later the corporate lawyer with the dazzling international clients. She was the federal judge who “saved baseball” by siding with the players’ union during a strike.

Now Sonia Sotomayor — a self-described “Nuyorican” whose mother, a nurse, and father, a factory worker, left Puerto Rico during World War II — is President Obama’s choice for the Supreme Court, with a chance to make history as only the third woman and first Hispanic to sit on the highest court in the land. Her up-by-the-bootstraps tale, an only-in-America story that in many ways mirrors Mr. Obama’s own, is one reason for her selection, and it is the animating characteristic of her approach to both life and the law.

“Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see,” Judge Sotomayor (pronounced so-toe-my-OR) said in 2001, in a lecture titled “A Latina Judge’s Voice.” “My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.”

From her days going to the movies with cousins to see Cantinflas, a Mexican comedian whom she once called the “Abbott and Costello of my generation,” to her current life in the rarefied world of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Judge Sotomayor, 54, has traveled what Mr. Obama called “an extraordinary journey.”

In her 2001 address, she spoke longingly of the “sound of merengue at all our family parties” and the Puerto Rican delicacies — patitas de cerdo con garbanzos (pigs’ feet with beans) and la lengua y orejas de cuchifrito (pigs’ tongue and ears) — that appealed to the “particularly adventurous taste buds” that she called “a very special part of my being Latina.”

Today, Judge Sotomayor’s culinary tastes range from tuna fish and cottage cheese for lunch with clerks in her chambers, to her standard order at the Blue Ribbon Bakery: smoked sturgeon on toast, with Dijon mustard, onions and capers. She works out three times a week, putting in three miles on the treadmill in the court’s gym. Divorced and with no children, she enjoys the ballet and theater and lives in a condominium in Greenwich Village — both a subway ride and a world away from the housing projects where she grew up.

Yet a few things have not changed: her feeling of herself as “not completely a part of the worlds I inhabit,” as she said in one speech; her drive and ambition; and her willingness to speak up about her own identity as a Latina and a woman. In many ways, she is walking through a door she pushed open herself. On the bench, Judge Sotomayor may be a careful deliberator, but off it she has been a tireless advocate for Latinos.

In 1976, she wrote her senior thesis at Princeton on Luis Muñoz Marín, the first democratically elected governor of Puerto Rico, and dedicated it in part “to the people of my island — for the rich history that is mine.” She has lectured at the University of Puerto Rico School of Law. In 2001, she was a speaker at a Princeton-sponsored conference titled “Puerto Ricans: Second-Class Citizens in ‘Our’ Democracy?’”

In describing his criteria for a Supreme Court pick, Mr. Obama said he was looking for empathy — a word that conservatives, who are already attacking Judge Sotomayor, have described as code for an activist judge with liberal views who will impose her own agenda on the law. Her critics also raise questions about her judicial temperament, saying she can be abrupt and impatient on the bench.

But Judge Sotomayor’s friends say she is simply someone who will bring the “common touch” that the president has said he prizes to her understanding of the law.

“I think she’s compassionate and empathetic, and I think she is going to really listen to people who are alleging that they have been victimized in some way,” said Robert H. Klonoff, dean of the Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore., who attended Yale Law with Judge Sotomayor and considers her a friend. Dean Klonoff, who last saw the judge in her New York chambers the day after Mr. Obama’s election, compares her to Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court’s first black justice, for the perspective he says she would bring to the court.

FOR CONTINUATION OF THIS STORY, CLICK THE LINK BELOW FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Woman in the News – Sotomayor, a Trailblazer and a Dreamer – NYTimes.com.