1946 Year

WE HAVE SEEN the magazine covers and the newspaper headlines, and we even heard it from the president in his State of the Union address: This year (drum roll please!), the first members of the baby boom generation will be turning 60 years old. Happy boomin' birthday. As any card-carrying member of the baby boom generation knows, when boomers do something, we do it with a bang. After all, we are the most important generation, aren't we?

Frank Pooler, a longtime choral director at Cal State Long Beach who is credited with helping the 1970s pop group the Carpenters develop their signature sound, has died. He was 86. Pooler died Jan. 19 in his Los Alamitos home after a short battle with lung cancer, said his wife, Rhonda Sandberg Pooler. He began teaching at the school in 1959 and founded the choral studies department. Among the students he mentored were a gangly brother and sister, Richard and Karen Carpenter.

Roberto Rossellini is commonly regarded as the founding father of Italian neorealism. It's a lofty label, since the movement was among the most influential in all of film history, but also one that doesn't quite do justice to his long, multifaceted career. The intense and unadorned films that Rossellini directed as Italy was emerging from the rubble of World War II -- "Open City" (1945), "Paisan" (1946), "Germany Year Zero" (1948) -- sealed his international reputation.

Pianist Menahem Pressler earned a right to relax a long time ago. He founded the Beaux Arts Trio in 1955, and that group has set the standards in that repertory for more than 40 years. The trio is still playing, and at 73, he's still in it, the only original member. Recently, however, Pressler began hitting the road as a recitalist. This brings his career full circle, since he started as a solo pianist.

Muriel Zink, a founder of New Directions for Women, one of the first alcohol treatment programs in the country designed specifically for women, has died. She was 88. Zink, who also helped launch several recovery programs designed for both men and women, died March 24 of natural causes at Saddleback Memorial Medical Center in Laguna Hills, near her longtime home, said her husband, Russell Zink. New Directions for Women opened in Costa Mesa in 1977 as a residential treatment program combining the essentials of Alcoholics Anonymous with physical and emotional therapies.

In 1997, Guillermo O. Rumingan, now 77, chained himself to the White House fence to protest what to him was a long-standing injustice: the absence of veterans' benefits for Filipinos like him who fought alongside Americans in World War II. He returned to the White House on Tuesday, this time to see President Bush sign a bill granting some of those benefits. "It's a good feeling," said Rumingan, an Arlington, Va.

Back in the days of Red scares, blacklists, suspicion and smear, Kim Soo-im was singled out as a one-woman axis of evil, a villainess without peer. "The Korean Seductress Who Betrayed America," as the U.S. magazine Coronet labeled her, was a Seoul socialite said to have charmed secret information out of one lover, an American colonel, and passed it to another, a top communist in North Korea. In June 1950, as North Korean invaders closed in on this panicked city, Kim was labeled a "very malicious international spy" by the South Korean military and hastily executed.

This finally might be the year. After his team advanced to the division semifinals two of the past three seasons, Hart football Coach Mike Herrington believes the Indians have the talent to win a Southern Section Division II championship. Hart dominated its opponents offensively and defensively, rolling to the first 10-0 regular season in school history.

"It's ironic that in Hollywood, where history is written on the wind and where our product deteriorates with time ... the cement in Grauman's forecourt is the only lasting memorial to artists who've made Hollywood famous." --Hedda Hopper, Los Angeles Times, 1953 * With no video, no lasers and not a single moving part, the colored slabs of concrete at Grauman's Chinese Theatre present an eerie interactive experience.

Laura D'Andrea Tyson, the UC Berkeley economist picked by President-elect Bill Clinton on Friday to head the Council of Economic Advisers, calls herself a "cautious activist" on trade issues. Opponents brand her a "protectionist." By whatever label, Tyson advocates something that makes die-hard defenders of free trade quiver: an aggressive industrial policy that would put U.S. industries on a more level playing field with their subsidized and heavily promoted counterparts worldwide.