Pioneer Group

In the dimly lit expanse of an old sugar packing house, diminutive Akemi Kikumura hunkers over great heaps of would-be junk, dusting off stories of a pioneer group of Americans. Perched on a display table are turn-of-the-century tabi , or socklike footwear, different from their overseas counterparts because they were cut from blue jeans. Nearby is a yellowed Montgomery Ward mail-order catalogue circa 1912 and a Boy Scouts of America scrapbook of the same era.

Jim Finks, the new president and general manager of the New Orleans Saints, picks the Chicago Bears to win Super Bowl XX "in a tight game" here next Sunday against the New England Patriots. "It will be a lot closer than most people think," says Finks, the man who built the Bears in the 10 years before he resigned as their general manager on Aug. 24, 1983. "The Patriots have some of the league's best talent. I know because they outdrafted us (the Bears) a lot of times."

Friday's opening of Orange County's Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall represents more than the most ambitious bid yet for world-class cultural cachet in an area long dogged by stereotypes of vanilla sprawl and the smug, provincial rich. The $200-million music palace also marks a juncture of two of the county's great fortunes, one built on plowed-over lima bean fields and the other on microchips.

Shares of publicly traded mutual fund companies have been among the biggest beneficiaries of the '90s bull market, as fund assets have swelled. But are the glory days over for these stocks? Wall Street's late-summer stumble, and steep declines in foreign-stock and high-yield bond markets, slammed most fund companies' shares. And while the sector has rebounded, many of the stocks remain well below their 1998 peaks.

Given the alternatives of a still-floundering Japanese stock market and a possibly overextended American one, many investment pros say that on the whole they'd rather be in Europe again this year. Among the world's largest equity markets, Europe's-- which mostly generated strong returns in the fourth quarter and in 1998 overall --present a good case for another year of outperformance, according to these experts.

O'Connell Street (formerly Sackville Street), Dublin's premier boulevard, now heavily occupied by fast-food restaurants ... Elvery's Elephant House, now Kentucky Fried Chicken ... --"The Ulysses Guide" Primed for the worst, I saw a favorable omen in her business card: "Mrs. Nora O'Rourke, Guest House Prop." Nora, of course, was also the name of James Joyce's beloved wife.

A year of big gains for previously overlooked and trampled-under stocks has done nothing to convince "value" investors that there aren't many more market lemons waiting to be turned into lemonade. Value investing--which focuses on companies with low debt, high cash flow and/or low price-to-earnings multiples--had a huge rebound in 2000 after being trounced by "growth" investing for two straight years.

Few indicators are so widely watched when evaluating the stock market as dividend yields. And few indicators seem to be working so poorly these days. How else can you explain this year's rally, which has seen the Dow Jones industrial average climb nearly 16% to record-high territory? According to dividend-yield enthusiasts, the rally never should have happened. They view the market as expensive whenever yields in the aggregate drop below 3% or so.

President Nelson Mandela has an uncanny knack for showing up at the right place at the right time, sometimes settling the stickiest situations just by being there. True believers might even suggest that the South African head of state had something to do with the auspicious timing of his 80th birthday, which he is scheduled to begin celebrating today with 1,400 foster children and a 300-pound vanilla sponge cake on a rugby field at Kruger National Park.

Which way did they go? One hundred and fifty years after the covered-wagon pioneers rolled through Nevada, history buffs are locked in an unprecedented legal battle over the location of the emigrants' trail near Reno. The pioneer trails group Trails West touched off the dispute in June when it announced plans to change three trail markers it said were placed inaccurately in Reno in the 1970s by another group.