Kinney, who died on May 2 at age 96 in Arizona, was a Maine native who originally dreamed of becoming a history teacher but decided during the Great Depression that the job market in education wasn’t bright enough. Instead, after a stint in the New Deal’s National Youth Administration, he noticed lobstermen throwing away crabs that crawled into their traps. He got the idea of canning the meat instead, and started a company to do it. In the late 1950s, Kinney eventually became an executive at Gorton’s Seafood Co., where he helped popularize the idea — apparently first conceived by Birdseye in 1953 — of carving up slabs of frozen cod, flounder and other fish into bite-sized sticks that could be breaded and pre-cooked for quick reheating.

According to seafood historian Mark Kurlansky, Gorton’s capitalized on Kinney’s creation by marketing it as a labor-saving breakthrough. As a period ad proclaimed: “Thanks to fish sticks, the average American homemaker no longer considers serving fish a drudgery. Instead, she regards it as a pleasure … easy to prepare, thrifty to serve, and delicious to eat.”

Indeed, fish sticks quickly became a phenomenon. A 1954 New York Times article on fish sticks described them as “the newest best-seller in supermarkets” and went on to point out: “Mothers report youngsters gobble the sticks like candy — or almost. … Their crisp surface and the fact that they may be eaten with one’s fingers attracts children.” One downside, the Times sniffed, was that “processing robs the fish of its identity and cloaks it in what apparently is an appetizing anonymity.”

Here’s a vintage 1982 Gorton’s commercial:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Photo: Superbass via Wikipedia

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If you’re a fan of orchestral music, opera, jazz or musical theater, there’s The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Should you prefer a more intimate venue, there’s Blues Alley. But would you ever think of the U.S. Supreme Court? Highly doubtful, to say the least.

As it turns out, however, the court’s nine justices aren’t so completely consumed with weighty matters that they can’t take an occasional afternoon break to enjoy some live music. On May 16, for example, they played host to Broadway legend Barbara Cook, 85, who won a Tony Award back in 1957 for her portrayal of Marian the Librarian in the original production of The Music Man. Cook was accompanied by a band that included jazz guitarist John Pizzarelli as she performed old standards such as “Bye Bye Blackbird,” “Let’s Fall in Love,” “I’ve Got Rhythm,” and “Makin’ Whoopie,” according to Legal Times.  

Cook’s choice for her final number, though, was a bit surprising: ”Imagine,” John Lennon’s quasi-anarchist anthem to the abolition of private property, religion and national governments. As the Wall Street Journal noted, the song’s sentiments were “strikingly at odds with court precedents granting privileges to religious institutions, enshrining property rights and limiting the reach of international law.” Nevertheless, Cook’s emotion-packed rendition apparently pleased the justices, who reportedly responded with an standing ovation.

The master of ceremonies was Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who in 2002 took over running the recital series that was started in 1988 by the late Justice Harry Blackmun, a music lover who brought such performers as singer and pianist Bobby Short to the court. Other performers who’ve appeared before the court include piano legend Marian McPartland and opera superstar Renee Fleming.

If you missed Cook’s performance at the court, as we did, here she is at the Tony Awards back in 1987.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Photo: Cook in 2009 by David Shankbone (via Wikipedia)

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The Big Sky Country state turns out to be the place in the United States where both dogs and cats have the longest life spans — 12.4 years for canines, 14.3 years for felines — according to the report compiled by Banfield, a nationwide chain of veterinary hospitals with 800 facilities in 43 states. That’s significantly above the average life span of 11.0 years for the 2.2 million dogs treated by Banfield’s vets and 12.1 years for the roughly 457,000 cats on its patient roster. Conversely, your pets may be threatening to run away if you live in Mississippi, where dogs treated by Banfield have an average life span of 10.1 years, and cats approximately 11.1 years.

The geographic discrepancy in the life spans of pets isn’t necessarily the fault of their owners. Instead, it’s probably a reflection of the high incidence of heartworm infections, which are transmitted by mosquitoes — an insect that thrives in places with long, hot, humid summers. Montana has an extremely low incidence of heartworm infections, according to the University of Montana, because the relatively short, cool summers don’t give mosquito larvae enough time to develop so that they can spread the disease when planted on pets. (Additionally, in Mississippi, roughly 20 percent of cats and 40 perecent of dogs haven’t been spayed or neutered, making them more vulnerable to cancer and other diseases, while Montanans are a bit more diligent in that regard.)

Related: What’s the Best Pet for You?

Interestingly, while Montana has the longest canine life span, it’s Oregon that has the largest proportion of geriatric dogs — that is, small breeds older than 11 years, medium-sized dogs 10 years or older, and large breeds older than 7 0r 8 years. About 13 percent of Oregon’s dogs are in that venerable category.

The Banfield report contains a wealth of other fascinating facts about our pets. Aside from parasites, they suffer from a lot of the same health problems as their owners do, such as heart disease and arthritis. About 20 percent of them have weight problems — which actually is better than the roughly 36 percent of U.S. adults who are obese and the 33 percent who are overweight, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

So maybe our dogs should be taking us for more walks, and our cats should be coaxing us to chase feathers.

Photo: Joakim Berndes via Flickr

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The big surprise, though, according to Gallup’s newly released annual economic and personal finance survey, is that the upward creep in retirement may not have that much to do with short-term economic woes. Instead, it may be an indication of a larger, more fundamental shift in how Americans live, work and age.

Gallup’s survey, conducted in mid-April, shows that the average age at which U.S. workers retire has increased four years over the past two decades: from 57 in 1993 to 61 today. But three-quarters of that upward shift occurred in the 1990s and early 2000s, according to Gallup’s data.

Gallup also found that workers’ predictions of their own retirement age have shifted even more dramatically. In 1995, nearly half of non-retired Americans — 49 percent — believed that they would retire before age 65, while 32 percent expected to retire at 65 and just 14 percent anticipated having to wait past 65. Today, 37 percent of workers say they will retire at age 65, while another 26 percent think they will work beyond that age. Only 26 percent think they will retire before they reach 65.

The closer they are to age 65, the more likely workers are to project a later retirement age. More than half of nonretirees ages 58 to 64 expect to retire after age 65, compared with 36 percent of nonretirees ages 50 to 57, 38 percent of those between 30 and 49, and just 26 percent of those younger than 30.

Those numbers are basically in line with research by the Urban Institute, which shows that the percentage of men between 62 and 74 who work has risen by 11 percentage points over the past couple of decades, from 27.3 percent in 1993 to 38.0 in 2009. The proportion of women in the same age group who are still working increased from 19.9 percent to 28.1 percent, a comparable rise.

One reason that people are envisioning a delayed retirement, of course, is money. Some 61 percent of non-retired workers say they are concerned abut having enough savings to retire comfortably, according to Gallup. But there’s also substantial evidence that many older workers are staying on the job because they get satisfaction from it. Boston College’s  Sloan Center on Aging and Work, for example, cites data from the mid-2000s showing that nine of 10 older workers enjoy their jobs.

If you’re thinking about retiring, but not quite ready, how about taking a part-time job, or starting a business?

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But it wasn’t always like that. In fact, when entertainment lawyer James Tolbert, who died on April 22 at age 86 in Santa Monica, started working to break the network color line in the early 1960s, there were few blacks in Hollywood — not just in acting, but on the other side of the camera, too.

Tolbert, who cofounded the Beverly Hills-Hollywood branch of the NAACP, helped shatter that color line. A moderate who preferred negotiation to confrontation, he worked hard to persuade more-aggressive activists to hold off on picketing the studios. Instead, he personally prodded network and advertising executives — who often publicly espoused support for the civil rights movement — to live up to their professed convictions. In an August 1963 speech to 125 of the industry’s top movers and shakers, later recounted by industry historian Mary Ann Watson, Tolbert made the case to them that integration also was a smart business move:

“We Negroes watch Bonanza and buy Chevrolets. We watch Disney on RCA sets. Jack Benny entertains us and we buy General Foods products. Our babies eat Gerber baby foods and we photograph them with Polaroid cameras. … we buy all the advertised products, the same as you do.”

Tolbert simultaneously pressured craft unions, and pushed for the hiring of at least one African-American technical employee on every movie and television show. He and the NAACP decided to crack the color line with the sitcom Hazel, and threatened a boycott of sponsor Ford Motor Co., unless the production hired at least one black. “We have said that beginning with Hazel, every crew should be integrated,” he proclaimed in a 1963 New York Times article. Hazel‘s producers agreed to comply, and hired a black employee. Others soon followed.

Within a few years, Tolbert’s efforts paid off. By the 1963-1964 season, black actors played almost 140 parts in network TV series, according to a Jet magazine analysis. The following year, Bill Cosby because the first African-American to star in a TV drama, with his role as Alexander Scott in NBC’s I Spy.

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A recent study by NPD Group shows that visits to commercial food establishments — both restaurants and “snack” establishments such as coffee shops — by customers 65 and older have grown nearly 8 percent over the past five years, despite rough economic times, while visits by those 55 to 64 have risen slightly. Meanwhile, restaurant traffic from customers between the ages of 18 and 47 has dropped 12 percent. (Visits by younger boomers, ages 48 to 54, have dropped by about 6 percent.)

Bonnie Riggs, NPD’s restaurant industry analyst, told the New York Times that the findings contradict longstanding assumptions that boomers would spend less on dining as they got older. “The Boomers happen to be very different than their predecessors,” Riggs explained. “They act younger. They eat younger. They want to live forever.”

But that doesn’t mean that boomers are willing to eat the same sort of food or go to the same restaurants as teens and twenty-somethings. As the Wall Street Journal reported in 2012, chains such as McDonald’s and Chipotle, which target mainly younger diners, have been disappointing investors.

Meanwhile, one of the chains with the strongest growth has been Panera Bread Co., whose restaurants feature both a more varied menu filled with fresh-tasting, vegetable-laden fare and homey, comfortable dining rooms, complete with cushioned booths that are easier on aging tailbones. Panera founder and chief executive Ronald Shaich — at 58, a boomer himself — told the Journal that his restaurant chain is “the prototypical baby boomer concept.” Not coincidentally, 41 percent of Panera’s customers are age 50 or older, compared with the 30 percent that casual dining establishments typically draw.

Restaurants are seeking to cater to older diners in other ways, too. In Baltimore, for example, some local establishments are providing loaner pairs of reading glasses to boomers who, having forgotten their own glasses, are having difficulty reading the menu.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Photo: Werner Kunz via Flickr

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Had it all happened after rather than before Watergate, in fact, no doubt the scandal would have been dubbed Estesgate.

Estes, who died on May 14 at age 88 in DeCordova, Texas, had a life story with so many bizarre twists that a Hollywood screenwriter would have hesitated to make them up, for fear of seeming far-fetched. He was born to a West Texas family so impoverished that it paid the obstetrician by giving him two hound dogs. Estes grew up plowing fields barefoot while he dreamed of becoming a business tycoon. He became a cotton farmer, and by age 28, was so successful that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce named him one of the nation’s 10 most outstanding young businessmen in 1953. According to a 1962 Time cover story on him, when he received the award, he uttered some prophetic words: “You have to walk out on a limb to the far end — that’s where the fruit is.”

For Estes, that meant the ammonia fertilizer business. He concocted a scheme that enabled him to steal $24 million from finance companies by getting them to write mortgages on nonexistent fertilizer tanks on farms, and a second cabal to swindle farmers out of federal cotton subsidies. Eventually, in 1965, he was convicted on federal mail fraud and conspiracy charges and sentenced to prison, but not before the Kennedy administration was scandalized by his connections with Agriculture Department officials and then-Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, to whom he claimed to have slipped vast amounts of cash — though the allegation was never proven.

Other weird details of the Estes affair made most of today’s political scandals look bland by comparison. A sampling:

• He claimed that then-Sen. Lyndon Johnson once called him at 5 a.m. to demand a half-million dollars. “The first thing I said was, ‘Lyndon, do you know what time it is?’” Estes told a reporter for the Houston Chronicle in 1996. ”He says, ‘I didn’t call you to find out what time it is. I called about that money.’” In exchange, he claimed, Johnson helped him to get lucrative federal contracts.  He never quite backed up those allegations with proof, just as he failed to substantiate a subsequent claim, made in a 2003 book, that Johnson had plotted JFK’s assassination.

• People connected with the case had an unfortunate habit of turning up dead under mysterious circumstances. They included USDA investigator Henry Marshall, who began looking into Estes’ affairs in 1961 and soon afterward was found shot to death on his farm. After Estes’ arrest in 1962, his accountant was found dead in an apparent suicide, in a car with the windows closed and a hose leading from the exhaust pipe — but with no carbon monoxide in his lungs. Both deaths, oddly, were ruled suicides, according to a Washington Post article on Estes.

• He had songs written about him. Phil Ochs sang “The Ballad of Billie Sol,” while in ”The Ides of Texas,” the Chad Mitchell Trio warbled the memorable line: “Here’s to a fella who couldn’t think small/Here’s to the biggest embezzler of all.”

  Click here to view the embedded video.

• He lived in the biggest house in Pecos, Texas. According to a 1989 Texas Monthly article, Estes and his family lived on an estate that took up an entire city block and included a 7,000-square-foot mansion, two tennis courts, a large swimming pool, palm trees imported from Florida and a barbecue pit big enough to accommodate two entire steers at the same time.

• His case caused a feline exhumation. The federal government believed Estes had stashed millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains, though they never were able to put their hands on the money. But it wasn’t for lack of trying. After learning that Estes had buried a friend’s cat in the early 1970s, government agents dug it up, in hopes that he had concealed money in the grave, according to the Chronicle article.

• After his release from prison, he became a T-shirt peddler. According to the 1989 Texas Monthly profile, after his release from prison in the late 1970s, Estes went into business with his daughter Pam, selling T-shirts and goods from the back of a station wagon at West Texas truck stops and barbecue-stand parking lots. “I have to watch him,” she told the magazine. “If he tells me he’s sold 200 t-shirts, it’s more like 20.”

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But that only partly captured the allure and the artistry of Kenneth Battelle, for whom the term “hair stylist to the stars” would have been an understatement. Battelle, who died on May 13 at age 86 in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., was perhaps the first coiffure creator to become an international celebrity in his own right, one with so much juice that Glamour magazine reportedly boosted its circulation simply by mentioning his name on the cover. Over the years, Battelle’s clientete sounded like the invitee list for an Academy Awards telecast: Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Lauren Bacall, Audrey Hepburn, and Lucille Ball (who referred to Battelle as “God”) were among a few of the Hollywood stars who went to him in an effort to look sufficiently glamorous on the red carpet.

Just as great painters tend to be known for a single masterpiece, Battelle had his signature coiffure: the gracefully billowy bouffant that he created in 1954 for the wife of a rising junior U.S. senator from Massachusetts. Jacqueline Kennedy turned to the then-unknown Battelle only because her regular stylist had called in sick. According to a 2003 Vanity Fair profile, Battelle, with remarkable boldness, decided that Mrs. Kennedy’s short, layered, frizzy “Italian cut” wasn’t right for her height and bone structure. Instead, he persuaded her that she should let that hairstyle grow out and go for a totally different look.

In the months that followed, Battelle stretched out Jackie’s hair, using special large-sized curlers that he had custom made, and gave it a more relaxed, natural appearance. The remarkable makeover transformed Battelle into a sought-after talent. He developed a special technique for making hair look soft and full, which involved wetting it and affixing clips to sections to separate them, while he snipped at them with blunt scissors.

Here are 10 intriguing facts about Battelle:

• Battelle, a native of Syracuse who served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, became a stylist when he was forced to drop out of college for lack of funds. He was enticed by a beauty school advertisement promising that anyone who graduated would earn $100 per week.

• His first job was at the decidedly déclassé Starlet Beauty Bar, a beauty parlor across from a Greyhound Bus station in Syracuse, where many of his clients were hookers.

• Battelle helped repair Marilyn Monroe’s hair, which had been damaged by excessive bleaching, and persuaded her to allow him to straighten it. “When you have a blob of curly platinum hair, that’s all you can see,” People quotes him as explaining. “You don’t see the beautiful face.”

• In 1963 he opened his own salon in a mansion at 19 East 54th Street in Manhattan, whose ornate decorations included marble Corinthian columns and a cascading staircase. Maids served clients lunch and tea on Porthault trays and lit aromatic Rigaud candles while they propped the customers’  feet on pillows. “I believe in coddle, coddle, coddle,” he explained to Vogue.

• After a fire destroyed his salon in the mid-1980s, he eventually relocated it to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

• At the apex of his popularity, a new high-society client might wait three months to get an appointment with him.

• He complained that the famous actresses and social butterflies who came to him sometimes wouldn’t trust in his imagination. “They say, ‘Do anything you want,’ and then come all the ifs, ands, and buts,” he explained in 1963. “That’s why models are so wonderful to work with — they’re not afraid to experiment.”

• During the Kennedy administration, his work on the First Lady’s hair led some wags to dub him the “Secretary of Grooming.”

• He once told New York magazine that salons should be glamorous places where “people [run] around in mud packs and [come] in with their Russian wolfhounds.”

• He explained the challenge of hairdressing to the Times in 1961: “Each head has a different texture, a different face to frame and a different personality to work with — all of these things go into creating a coiffure. It’s not just knowing how to put in a lot of rollers.”

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For a society that had developed a stiff upper lip to cope with the collective traumas of the Great Depression and World War II, Brothers was a perfect fit. An upgraded version of Ann Landers, with a Ph.D. from Columbia University to buttress her common-sense adages, her succession of TV advice programs (beginning with The Dr. Joyce Brothers Show in 1958) and bestselling books provided viewers with a much-needed license to open up and confront their feelings and inadequacies.

Brothers, nearly always, persuaded us to have faith in self-insight’s transformative power to solve problems. The New York Times wrote in 1971 that she “monitors the nation’s emotional barometer through her mass practice over the airways and in print.” A 1981 Baltimore Sun profile of Brothers put it more succinctly: “A nation cries on her shoulder.”

Like Woody Allen’s fictional character Zelig, Brothers also had the knack for popping up in the most surprising places. Here are five such moments:

• Brothers first became a celebrity not because of her emotional acumen, but thanks to what the Times once described as a “vacuum cleaner memory.” She was an autodidact who absorbed trivia — a gift that she put to use in becoming the first woman ever to win the top prize on the famous quiz show, The $64,000 Question, in 1955. When that program was scandalized by revelations that answers had been leaked to some contestants, she appeared on a spinoff program, The $64,000 Challenge, and proved her mettle by answering a series of arcane questions about boxing.

  Click here to view the embedded video.

• In this interview with Joan Rivers, she explains how a man’s choice of fruit reveals his inner qualities.

  Click here to view the embedded video.

• In the MTV video for guitarist Jeff Beck’s song “Ambitious,” Brothers had a cameo as a would-be vocalist at an audition.

  Click here to view the embedded video.

• In this segment of the The Bill Boggs Show, she gives Andrew Dice Clay, the coarse early 1990s comedian, some help in providing advice to the studio audience.

  Click here to view the embedded video.

• In this episode of Taxi, Brothers makes a surprise cameo, playing the therapist who has cured Latka (Andy Kaufman) of multiple personality disorder.

  Click here to view the embedded video.

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Photo: Paramount/Everett Collection

No, what you bugged your parents to get you for your birthday or Christmas was a Schwinn Sting-Ray. It had strangely tiny wheels and an undersized 20-inch frame, with a curvy “banana” seat and ape-hanger handlebars. Adults thought it was goofy, but in your mind, it looked exactly like one of the Harley-Davidson choppers you saw in the newspaper ads for those drive-in movies you weren’t old enough to go to see yet. You imagined pedaling around your neighborhood, slouched back as you clutched those plastic-handle grips, looking so boss as you popped a wheelie and balanced on the back wheel for a split second, like a cowboy trying to break a wild horse.

See also: Hottest summer songs from 1960s (slideshow)

Schwinn executive Al Fritz, who died on April 7 at age 88 in Barrington, Ill., was the bicycle industry visionary responsible for your youthful fantasy. As the then-Chicago-based company’s director for research and development in the early 1960s, Fritz found out that kids in California were getting old 20-inch-frame bikes from the scrap heap and customizing them to look like motorcycles by replacing the factory seats and handlebars. He devised a prototype, and although company management initially snickered at the idea, it quickly became a runaway hit. From 1963 to 1968, Schwinn sold nearly two million Sting-Rays, and the style became so popular that for a while, with competitors churning out clones, it accounted for 60 percent of all the bikes sold in the United States. Here’s a video that plays tribute to classic Sting-Ray advertisements:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here are 5 intriguing facts about Fritz and his brainchild:

1. According to Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, before he invented the Sting-Ray, Fritz played a significant role in the development of Schwinn’s Varsity and Continental 10-speeds, which were the first U.S.-made lightweight derailleur bikes. He also came up with the idea for the Airdyne, a stationary exercise bike with moving arms that powered a giant fan.
2. The “banana seat” of the Sting-Ray actually evolved from a seat designed for use in playing bicycle polo, according to bike historian William Love.
3. Though the Sting-Ray originally was intended to evoke a custom motorcycle, Schwinn also imitated 1960s car fads. It tried to capitalize on the growing popularity of drag racing with a 1965 model that featured a dragster-style slick rear tire. The following year, it came out with a Sting-Ray model, the Fastback,  that incorporated a gearshift, just like the ones in the Pontiac GTO and other mid-1960s muscle cars.
4. Schwinn made an even smaller version of the Sting-Ray, the Midget, from 1967 to 1972, which had a scaled-down frame so that your little brother or sister could pretend to be a big kid, which probably drove you crazy.
5. The apex of Sting-Ray coolness was the Krate line, introduced in 1968, which an advertisement touted as the “flashiest” Sting-Ray ever. It featured a tiny 16-inch front wheel, designed to emulate a rail dragster, with a heavy-duty aluminum-encased front brake, a five-speed “Stik-Shift,” spring struts under the banana seat and a frame with a flamboyantly bright paint job. The original Orange Krate model was followed by the red Apple Crate, the yellow Lemon Peeler, and the green Pea Picker.

Wham-O, more famous for its flying disks, tried to capitalize on the Sting-Ray fad by marketing an add-on gadget that made it easier to do a wheelie. Here’s the commercial, which is a hoot:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Photo: Nels P. Olsen via Wikipedia

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