Careers

One man in the classroom earned more than $100,000 framing tract homes during the building heyday. Another installed pools and piloted a backhoe. Behind him sat a young father who made a good living swinging a hammer in southern Utah. But that was before construction jobs vanished like a fast-moving dust storm in this blustery high desert. Hard times have brought them to a classroom in rural Kern County to learn a different trade. Tonight's lesson: how to avoid death and dismemberment.

DRAKE HOGESTYN Actor John Black -- the mysterious, amnesia-prone spy -- has been shot, stabbed, strangled, in a plane crash, ejected from a submarine, trapped in a gas chamber, stalked by a serial killer and, of course, attacked by Satan. It's been the role of a lifetime for Drake Hogestyn. Essentially, it's been his only role since he arrived on "Days of Our Lives" 23 years ago.

Sitting in a bare cubicle, with her reading glasses perched halfway down her nose and typing away on a laptop she'd brought from home, Lois Draegin looked a bit like the extra adult wedged in at the kids' table at Thanksgiving. This accomplished magazine editor lost her six-figure job at TV Guide last spring and is now, at 55, an unpaid intern at wowOwow.com, a fledgling website with columns and stories that target accomplished women older than 40.

When celebrity photographer Barbra Porter picks up her camera, such stars as Billy Bob Thornton, Garth Brooks and Eric Clapton know she'll make them look good. But in her other career, Porter also makes the stars sound good -- by performing as a violinist for the Academy Awards telecast, on the soundtrack to "Pirates of the Caribbean" and in concert with Celine Dion. "I think many musicians have multiple talents," says Porter, who rejects the image of stuffy, single-minded classical artists.

The stocking repairman is long dead, the hat seller is gone too, but down Via Merulana the sparks still fly around Sergio Zoppo, his hands, the color of ore, skimming knife blades across grindstones. The steel heats and hums, a kind of music in the late morning air, coiling through the roar of buses, the whine of motorini. He looks up, glasses dangling on a string around his neck, his blue smock smeared with minerals and grime.

A few words of advice for the graduating class of 2008: When you get your first real job, you may feel rich. But don't act like it. There are a handful of money moves you can make now that will virtually ensure your financial security -- and possibly create great wealth -- later in life. The younger you are, the greater the opportunities and the easier the wealth strategies are to execute.

After 50 years practicing dentistry in Santa Monica, Cal Kurtzman hung up his drill and embarked on a well-deserved second chapter of life. Not golf. Not rest. Not even volunteer work. Although he spent a short stint as an unpaid advocate for foster children, the families' problems were "really beyond the scope of my education." What he knew -- and loved -- was dentistry.

If you're facing years of student loan payments but aren't making much money because you're working in public service, the federal government has some good news for you. A law that takes effect Tuesday could allow you to have some of your college debt forgiven.

The weather is balmy, the local beaches are inviting, and so, naturally, San Diego State students are thinking about . . . accounting. Yes, accounting. It's become one of the hot courses on campus. Enrollment is up, one of the accounting lecturers has twice been named professor of the year, and several dozen students spent their summer mornings in a class poring over a 3-inch-thick tome titled "Federal Taxation."

The elementary school moms didn't ask a lot of questions about this man Bill. They were too eager to tell him -- to tell anybody -- about the loose and snarling pit bulls, the gun-toting gangsters, and the dogcatchers and police who always seemed to come too late. The principal, Helena Lazo, had introduced him simply: "Bill nos va a ayudar." Bill is going to help us.