Classic 1966 Mustang.

The Mustang, the so-called pony car that launched affordable and compact sports cars, today strongly hews to the look of the 1964 original. But Ford is working on radical makeover of its signature youth-market car, people familiar with Ford’s plans said. The next generation would retain the shark-nosed grille and round headlights, but would look more like the new Ford Fusion than the current Mustang, according to Ford sources.

The change is part of a bid to make the Mustang appeal to Generation Y, the roughly 80 million people who were born between 1980 and 1999, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Mick got it right when he sang, “We don’t get no satisfaction … ”

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That could be the case for many of their real-world contemporaries if they hope to enjoy financially secure retirements, reports CNBC.

Baby Boomers, with their inheritances, homes, and old-fashioned pensions, may appear to be on track for a solid retirement — but some experts say the forecast for the generation born from 1946 through 1964 isn’t necessarily so rosy.

While Boomers are more likely than younger workers to have defined-benefit pension plans and certain other advantages — that’s particularly true of older Boomers — many may wind up financially ill-prepared for retirement unless they work longer and save more.

The recent financial crisis took a toll on wealth; inheritances on average won’t be that big; traditional pension benefits are phasing out; and many shop-till-you-drop Baby Boomers simply haven’t saved enough money to last through retirements that should stretch beyond those of previous generations, economists note.

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The Encyclopedia Britannica, the oldest English-language encyclopedia still in print, is going out of print and moving solely into the digital age. I suppose many of us baby boomers might view it as another end of an era.

In continuous print since it was first published in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1768, Encyclopedia Britannica announced recently it will end publication of its printed editions and continue only with digital versions available online for a nominal charge.

The Encyclopedia Britannica lasted so long because it was credible and trusted. It was vetted by scholars and academics.

From the benefit of our grown-up hindsight, maybe the Encyclopedia was not perfect or complete. But is has always been well-written. The expertly authenticated articles sparked curiosity and knowledge among readers, including many young boomers. This was how many of us and then our children learned about the world. The stories were written and edited by experts. It was a costly business model.

Today, the whole notion of seasoned, skilled and trained editors is vanishing. It’s too expensive. Vanishing in mainstream print and broadcast media, and vanishing at online news and information resources.

At the other end of the credibility scale from Encyclopedia Britannica is Wikipedia.org, which apparently has never had editors but rather administrators with enough latitude on their own for personal bias, anger, ignorance and lack of knowledge to influence decisions over what appears and what does not.

Worse yet, the administrators for Wikipedia.org have no journalistic or editorial training! But, they are the decision-makers for information that goes online that we – you and I – are supposed to assume is accurate. Are we being conned?

We pay a price when things and facts are not checked-out. Information becomes less credible, less trusted and less of value. We are not as informed as we might have been.

Mainstream news media in America’s free society – unlike the old Soviet Union and Nazi Germany – has provided us the ability to learn more or less who reports, edits and publishes news and information. That’s called transparency, openness, accountability. Not so in the dark and virtually unaccountable environment of Wikipedia.org.

A friend who grew up behind the Iron Curtain pointed this out to me, suggesting that Wikipedia’s style reminded him of the old Soviet style of journalism.

Wikipedia was founded by Jimmy Wales, a former options and futures trader. The concept is clever but increasingly there are questions about the ethical standards, veracity, credibility and prejudices of this somewhat shadowy information resource. Who is the cast of characters behind the secrecy of Wikipedia? Who is pulling the levers over what appears and what does not. What is deemed “notable” and what is not?

The profile of a widely known women’s rights advocate was rejected by a Wikipedia administrator who alleged that a link used as a citation to a press release on the website of an International Religious organization was “copyright infringement.” Wikipedia.org is full of such links to provide citations and evidence. Upon examination, the excuse by the administrator not to post the profile was ill-informed and inaccurate. I learned that Wikipedia does not admit to its own mistakes.

Nothing on the website or the press release used for the citation mentioned copyright, and I wondered whether his own bias was being revealed. So I dug into learning the true identity of the administrator. Most are computer geeks, not the literary sort.

This Wikipedia administrator lives in England. He claims to be a computer guy who still works with MsDos, an operating system from the 1980s. He has no editorial or academic experience. There is nothing in his online bio that suggests that he ever attended higher education. He is a typical Wikipedia administrator who rejects some information yet approves profiles of criminals without ever checking factual accuracy. He apparently approves or rejects to suit his personal fancy.

Click here to read the Wikipedia administrator’s credentials on his own website.

I learned that the administrators had rejected the profile of a well-known U.S. TV network correspondent and author of several books. The reason given was, “not notable.” Wikipedia’s criteria for determining what is “notable” is not revealed, and therefore open to personal bias.

Citing Wikipedia’s “the human factor” of such unpaid administrators is why an increasing number of journalists, online content managers and others are questioning the current and long-term credibility and value of Wikipedia.

Encyclopedia Britannia has had a highly respected editorial board over the years to assure excellence. Wikipedia.org has none. Encyclopedia Britannia has had well-known editorial guidelines. Wikipedia.org has none.

If Wikipedia is hobbled by a lack of enlightened ethical and journalistic criteria for a new age of information, skilled editors and knowledgeable experts, what value is it as an online tool to provide substantive value? Who really can trust the accuracy of Wikipedia?

Is that the information we baby boomers grew up in and remember? No, not in my opinion.

Do we, as parents, want our children relying on something like Wikipedia for their school assignments? Remember, Encyclopedia Britannica will still be online … and it can be trusted.

Davy Jones of The Monkees.

But I’m not still a teenager and, as if I needed to be reminded of that fact, former teenage heart-throb Davy Jones of the band the Monkees has died. At the age of 66, he was several years older than me and died of a heart attack at his home in Florida. A very real reminder of my own mortality and that of my entire generation. As the Monkees once sang, “We’re the young generation and we’ve got something to say.” Well, we Baby Boomers may not be finished as a generation with impact on the world but truth be known, we now have had our say and are no longer the young generation. We are of an age when things like heart attacks may become more commonplace than love-ins.

Though I was never a true Monkees fan, I remember watching them on TV every week as a kid. They meant something to my generation. The older of my two sisters thought Davy Jones was the “absolute cutest boy on earth!” I first heard the news of his passing on the car radio while picking my kids up from school. My kids in the backseat were soon singing merrily and loudly about soaking up the sun as a Sheryl Crow song came on. They have no idea who the Monkees were and Davy Jones means absolutely nothing to them.

Now my kids are “the young generation with something to say” and have their own rock heroes. Life goes on. But I confess feeling more than a tinge of sadness at the news about Jones. Rest in peace Davy.

It’s humbling for the those of us who came of age in the sixties to wake up one morning and discover that “the sixties” isn’t an era, it’s our age, and along with the graying hair come hip replacements, valve replacements, and knee replacements. The flower children who once wore granny glasses have morphed into bionic grannies who now sport bifocals and cringe at the moniker “senior.”

For some, the onset of grand-parenthood is synonymous with senility. However, as the daughter of Holocaust survivors, I grew up painfully aware that there was once an entire generation that was cruelly deprived of the opportunity to grow old. And so, from the moment I held my first grandchild, Scarlett, in my arms, I couldn’t wait for the day she would finally call me “Bubby.”

As an immigrant growing up in the 1950s, I was conscious that my classmates’ homes were nicer and their clothing was finer. But what I really envied the most were their grandparents. My paternal grandparents were exterminated in the Treblinka concentration camp. My maternal grandmother, whose Jewish name I carry, perished in Sobibor. I had no one to call Bubby.

Helen Zegerman Schwimmer and her grandchildren.

But now life has come full-circle. I have become the loving Bubby I never had. Scarlett is the cherished grandchild I never was. Before she learned the language of words, we communicated with our eyes and our hearts. Now she is five and we share confidences and Barbie dolls.

But that’s not the end of it. When I thought it couldn’t get any better, I was blessed with the birth of two grandsons, Gabriel and Azariah, in quick succession. Now I find myself pushing a Bugaboo down the very same streets I once pushed my own children’s Perego.

As we walk past the Holocaust Memorial Park at the foot of Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, I feel suddenly compelled to navigate the baby carriage down the narrow path that leads to the historical stone markers. I stand before “Sobibor” and read the sorrowful inscription etched in granite. Among the 200,000 Jews murdered on the grounds of this concentration camp were the members of my mother’s family.

My gaze shifts to the infant sleeping peacefully in his stroller.

“This is your great great grandson,” I tell my own Bubby, Mina.

Bob Brody

Most parents have told their children how they met their future spouses. And most say they consider it highly important to do so. But others have never shared that story. And almost none has captured the memory in writing.

That’s what we’ve learned from an informal Valentine’s Day survey of 100 parents conducted by letterstomykids.org, a blog created to inspire parents to record personal family history, in writing, for future generations.

For example, 77% of parents have told their children how they met their future spouses. And of those, 45% did it to “preserve personal family history,” while 34% did it because “the kids asked.”

Of the parents who have yet to tell their children, 66% never found the right time, 20% doubt the kids would be interested,” 7% said it was “unimportant” to reveal, and another 7% just preferred to keep the matter private.

Asked how important it is – on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest – for parents to tell their children how they met, 43% gave it a 10, with only 3% ranking it less than a 5.

Here are some other key findings:

• 6% of the children who were told how their parents came together reacted with “amusement,” 32% with “appreciation,” and 13% with “indifference.”
• All of the parents who told their children did so face to face. But only 4% of those parents also wrote the story down.
• 26% of parents describe their first meeting as “love at first sight,” 7% as “doubt at first sight,” and 67% as “something in between.”

Personally, I think it’s terrific that most parents tell their kids how they met. But I also urge parents to put it down for perpetuity in writing. It’s history, after all. Only then can parents be sure that even if the story is forgotten, it will always be there, in black and white, as a reminder.

Here are the full survey results.

We’re at no loss for confidence from presidential candidates, most of whom are baby boomers, about how good things will be if they win. But I’ll tell you in a moment why they’ve all got it wrong.

First, the Republicans, the ones who’ve managed to stay in the race? They promise us that if elected, they will trash whatever Barack Obama has done and put America back on the path to prosperity.

For his part, President Obama has the same playbook but a different strategy: he will build on what he already has done to keep America on the path back to prosperity.

Greg Dobbs, veteran television correspondent, on location in Moscow.

Good luck to both sides. If there’s one thing on which we all can agree, it is that we like prosperity, and want as much as we can get. But you know what? No matter who wins in November, it won’t primarily be his policies that get us there. And here’s the proof: while our economy went south under the policies of the last Republican president, we didn’t see an eye-popping U-turn to the north under the policies of the incumbent Democrat. Some would translate that to read, a pox on both their houses.

Yet America will recover, or continue its recovery (depending on who you talk to). But it won’t be because of our ability to manufacture hard goods any more; sure, what we do build we now build well and if you include petroleum, we are still the biggest producer of goods and services in the world. But as we have seen since we became the leading generation in this country, although a little more manufacturing is coming back to our shores from overseas, by and large, it’s still cheaper to build things elsewhere.

Rather, we will find prosperity because of an intangible quality I’ve always had trouble getting my head around…until now. It’s called innovation. Inventiveness. Entrepreneurial brainpower. And by and large, baby boomers have been the driving force. But what I’ve never gotten my head around was, how do those characteristics translate to prosperity? What good does it do us to imagine great things if we aren’t actually turning them into something solid?

And then I read this headline: “App Economy has created 466,000 jobs.” That’s the “app economy” as in “Angry Birds,” “Facebook,” “CNN.com,” apps that give you the world via the smartphone, the tablet, and the social media. The online piece under the headline— reporting a study by TechNet, a think tank for high-tech corporations — likened the “App Economy” to “a 21st Century construction sector.” That’s when the little light went off in my head: we still build things, but we don’t buy them off the shelf any more at the mall and, standing alone, we don’t even hold them in our hands.

No, what we do today to stay at the apex of global commerce is innovate, then turn those innovations, however physically intangible, into something that people can actually use. And if you doubt that, consider this: today there are something like a million apps out there in the marketplace, and every day the number grows. Lest you think they’re mostly games that fling birds into buildings, think again: according to TechNet’s report, “Every major consumer-facing company… discovered that they need an app to be the public face of the business.” In other words, “app” employment is the construction sector for the 21st Century because apps have become the front door we walk through to do business.

Oh, our next president — and all the politicians down the pyramid — will claim credit for our prosperous future. But truth be known,they don’t have nearly so much to do with it as they used to. And that’s a good thing. We don’t have to depend on dysfunctional elected officials to find prosperity; we only have to depend on ourselves.

I have always been active. As a child I loved riding my bike and hiking in the mountains. Though I have never been much of an athlete, in the 70′s and 80′s I enjoyed jazzercise, volleyball, biking, and jogging; later I moved on to yoga, tai chi, and Pilates. Then a few weeks ago I fell and twisted my knee.

I found that I had torn the ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) in my knee. This is a tear in one of the knee ligaments that joins the upper leg bone with the lower leg bone and commonly causes knee instability. I think they ought to call it the BBACL (baby boomer anterior cruciate ligament).

The doctor told me that not long ago, ACL injuries had been uncommon for anyone of my age; this sort of injury only happened to people in their 20′s or to people focused on sports, primarily football players. But he said says ACL injuries now are becoming more common in people of my age group, which means, my boomer friends, us. They even call it “Boomeritis,” because we are more active and not ready to sit on the sidelines and watch the world go by. The doc also said that if this had happened to me a few years ago, most doctors would have preferred to just leave it alone. But now they have learned that leaving it can lead to arthritis and the knee would always be unstable and might pop out of joint.

I am lucky that close to where I live there is a state-of-the-art sports injury institute, where I will undergo ACL replacement surgery. I will be in a brace for weeks with lots of physical therapy in the coming months. But that’s fine; I am willing to go through this because I am looking forward to some day climbing around Machu Picchu, taking a walking tour of Europe, or maybe just riding my bike. I have a lot of things to do and am not ready for the rocking chair.

I guess I am a typical baby boomer. More power to us! Better knees, too.

Marcia Barhydt

As far back probably as Year 1 in the workplace, there’s been a conflict between senior management and hot young cannibals new to corporate life. Traditionally, the older, more seasoned employees have been the ones to train new faces.

That was then and this… it seems… is now. Traditional roles are being reversed and we Boomers need to (in Ted Turner’s famous phrase) get on board or get out of the way.

In a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, this new premise was debated, investigated, and tossed around. And once this new concept is accepted, everybody wins.

The trend is most apparent in technology and social media, but encompasses other scenarios, like the advertising industry.

It turns out that this thinking was pioneered by JackWelch when he was a CEO of General Electric and had a 20-year-old mentor toteach him about surfing. Reverse mentoring also has evolved to include, for example, a 42-year-old exec at advertising icon Ogilvy & Mather who says his mentor is showing him how to perk up his humdrum tweets.

Of course, this younger generation doing the mentoring has already exploded to a global level thanks to Skype, videoconferencing and all kinds of virtual communications.

The lesson here is that Boomer execs, or really anyone in any position where younger workers can help, need to be open to and welcoming mentoring from co-workers who are younger than the exec’s own kids.

Now, we Boomers are no slouches when it comes to adapting and escalating our use of new technology. Think tablets, readers, and smartphones that do everything but make your coffee. Boomers are snapping up these new toys like it’s Christmas every day. We truly understand that we need to be on top of all this new technology. Okay, plus it’s fun, fun, fun.

Within many large companies where reverse mentoring is happening, the Boomer execs are wanting to get on board in a sort of “Hey, I want one too” kind of thinking.

Sure, there are hold-outs who cling desperately to the old regime and their old seniority way of thinking. But their numbers are diminishing every day.

We Boomers are once again showing that we’re easily capable of accepting change. No wait, we’re embracing it!

Why doesn’t this surprise me? It’s how we’ve been with every other stage of our lives. Why would we change now? Why would we balk at the idea of reverse mentoring?

Thanks Ted – we’re hearing you. We’re getting on board.

©2012 Marcia Barhydt

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As I busily wrap the Chanukah gifts for my little grandchildren, I’m suddenly reminded of an event that took place many years ago when my own kids were young. There are inexplicable moments in our lives that seem to take on a mythical quality as the years go by, so that we wonder if they ever really happened. This is the story of one such mystifying event.

Helen Zegerman Schwimmer

It was a few days before Chanukah. I was driving home from the local mall, my trunk overflowing with games and toys for my three children, when the car suddenly slowed to a crawl. I nervously steered it on to the grassy shoulder of the highway and hit the emergency brake. The gas gauge registered empty.

This was back in the days before cell phones, so there was nothing to do but pop open the hood and wait, hoping a Good Samaritan or the highway police would eventually stop. But when the cars continued to whiz by I grew increasingly impatient and decided to hike to the nearest gas station that I had passed about a quarter of a mile back.

“My car ran out of gas on the parkway,” I sheepishly confessed to the gas station attendant.

“Can’t spare anybody right now,” he said. Instead, he offered to fill a two-gallon can halfway and I trudged back down the road, like the biblical Rebecca hauling her jug from the well. It wasn’t until I removed the cap from the can that I realized the spout was missing, so I had no way of pouring the oil into the tank.

As the sun started to sink, so did my spirits. Why me? Why today? Why here on this busy highway that was beginning to feel like a desolate stretch of desert? The answer would arrive shortly.

I watched a battered car pull off the road a few feet in front of me. While a child peered out from the rear window, a young woman emerged from the driver’s seat. She walked purposefully over to the trunk, opened it and removed an object, then turned and came towards me, smiling broadly.

“I bring this for you—you need this,” she said with a Hispanic accent as she offered me the tin can with a spout. Seeing the look of amazement on my face she explained, “I carry this for emergency.”

I had always assumed that angels commute via their wings. So I was totally unprepared for this modern-day version that drove up in a Chevy. I silently accepted the container, unscrewed the spout and poured the liquid from my can into hers and then into my tank. The whole procedure took only seconds.

“Thank you,” I murmured gratefully as I handed back the empty can. Before I could offer her any reward, she hurried back to her car and just as mysteriously as she had arrived, the stranger drove off with a wave.

I turned the ignition key, relieved to hear the familiar hum of the engine and steered my car back onto the highway. And just as the last ray of light left the sky I headed towards home, glowing from the gift that was worth so much more than the gasoline I had just received.

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