NY-born twin friars die on same day at age 92

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Identical twins Julian and Adrian Riester were born seconds apart 92 years ago. They died hours apart this week. The Buffalo-born brothers were also brothers in the Roman Catholic Order of Friars Minor. Professed friars for 65 years, they spent much of that time working together at St. Bonaventure University, doing carpentry work, gardening and driving visitors to and from the airport and around town.

"It was fun to see them, just quiet, gentle souls," Yvonne Peace, who worked at the St. Bonaventure Friary for nearly 21 years, said Friday.

They died Wednesday at St. Anthony Hospital in St. Petersburg, Fla., Brother Julian in the morning and Brother Adrian in the evening.

Both died of heart failure, said Father James Toal, guardian of St. Anthony Friary in St. Petersburg, where the inseparable twins lived since moving from western New York in 2008.

"It really is almost a poetic ending to the remarkable story of their lives," St. Bonaventure spokesman Tom Missel said. "Stunning when you hear it, but hardly surprising given that they did almost everything together."

Julian and Adrian Riester were born Jerome and Irving on March 27, 1919, to a couple who already had five daughters. They took the names of saints upon their ordination in the Catholic church.

"Dad was a doctor and he said a prayer for a boy," Adrian once said, according to St. Bonaventure. "The Lord fooled him and sent two."

After attending St. Joseph's Collegiate Institute, the brothers were turned away by the military because of their eyesight, the university said. One had a bad left eye, the other a bad right eye.

Eventually they joined the friars of Holy Name Province in New York City. They received separate assignments before reuniting at the seminary at St. Bonaventure from 1951 to 1956. After serving parishes in Buffalo for 17 years, they returned to St. Bonaventure in 1973 and spent the next 35 years there.

They had separate rooms in the friary but one telephone extension that rang into both, Peace recalled. It was usually the more talkative Adrian who answered, though Julian possessed a quiet authority. They never said who was born first.

"Brother Julian was like the big brother. Brother Adrian would defer to him," Peace said. "They picked up one of our friars at the airport one time and the friar said, `Can I take you to dinner?'

"Brother Adrian looked at Brother Julian and said, `We aren't going to dinner?' `No, we'll go home,'" Peace said. "So that was it. No discussion, no contradicting. `No, we aren't going today.'"

Funeral services are scheduled for Monday at St. Mary Our Lady of Grace Church in St. Petersburg. Afterward, the brothers' bodies will be flown to Buffalo and buried Wednesday at St. Bonaventure Cemetery, across the street from the university.

High fashion or bait? Fly ties now hair extensions

BOISE, Idaho – Fly shop manager Jim Bernstein was warned that hair stylists would come banging on his door, but he didn't listen.

Sure enough, less than 24 hours later, a woman walked into the Eldredge Bros. Fly Shop in Maine and made a beeline toward a display of hackles — the long, skinny rooster feathers fishermen use to make lures.

"She brought a bunch up to the counter and asked if I could get them in pink," he said. "That's when I knew."

Fly fishing shops nationwide, he learned, are at the center of the latest hair trend: Feather extensions. Supplies at stores from the coasts of Maine to landlocked Idaho are running out and some feathers sold online are fetching hundreds of dollars more than the usual prices.

"I'm looking around the shop thinking hmmm, what else can they put in their hair?" Bernstein said.

Fly fishermen are not happy, bemoaning the trend in online message boards and sneering at so-called "feather ladies." Some also blame "American Idol" judge and rocker Steven Tyler, who began wearing the feathers in his long hair.

"It takes years and years and years to develop these chickens to grow these feathers. And now, instead of ending up on a fly, it's going into women's hair," said Matt Brower, a guide and assistant manager at Idaho Angler in Boise.

"I think that's the reason a lot of people are a little peeved about it," he said.

The feathers are not easy to come by in the first place.

They come from roosters that are genetically bred and raised for their plumage. In most cases, the birds do not survive the plucking.

At Whiting Farms, Inc., in western Colorado, one of the world's largest producers of fly tying feathers, the roosters live about a year while their saddle feathers — the ones on the bird's backside and the most popular for hair extensions — grow as long as possible. Then the animal is euthanized.

As hair extensions, the feathers can be brushed, blow dried, straightened and curled once they are snapped into place. Most salons sell the feather strands for $5 to $10 a piece. The trend has become so popular a company online even sells feather extensions for dogs.

The craze has also left hairstylists scrambling to find rooster saddle feathers, as fly shops hold onto a select few for their regular customers. The businesses will now ask if the feathers are for hairdressing, said Shelley Ambroz, who owns MiraBella Salon and Spa in Boise.

"If you go in and you're a woman, they won't sell to you," said Ambroz, who started to eye her husband's fly fishing gear after stores ran out.

"He told me to stay out of his feathers," she said.

Whiting Farms is harvesting about 1,500 birds a week for their feathers and still can't keep up with its current orders, said owner and founder Tom Whiting, a poultry geneticist. The company has stopped taking on new accounts.

"I've tried to withhold some for the fly fishing world because when the fashion trend goes away, which it will, I've still got to make a living," he said.

The company was the one that told Bernstein in Maine several months ago that rooster saddle feathers had somehow become the latest coveted hair accessory. Bernstein said he scoffed at the notion that it could reach his shop along the coast of southern Maine.

"This is Maine, it's not California. We're a little behind the trends here," he said. "I screwed up. I should have said: `Send me everything you've got.'"

Bernstein's inventory of rooster saddle feathers has long been depleted. About three weeks ago, he dusted off a rooster neck with feathers that had been set aside for fly tying classes at the shop. The neck would have normally cost $29.95, but the shop sold it for $360.

It's not uncommon to find a package of rooster saddle feathers that would have cost around $60 at a fly shop now priced from $200 to $400.

A package of the most popular fly tying hackle for hair extensions, a black and white striped feather called grizzly saddle, would normally retail anywhere from $40 to $60. It sold for $480 on eBay last month after 31 bids.

At the Boise salon, Ambroz has stowed away enough feathers to last about six months.

On a recent Tuesday evening, Emilee Rivers, 16, sifted through a pile of rooster saddle feathers looking for the perfect strands to frame her face. She picked out four and handed them to the stylist, who bonded them together with hot glue before clipping them into Rivers' blond hair.

Brandi Wheeler, 16, was next. There's only one other girl at Borah High School in Boise who has the feather extensions, the teenagers said.

Now, they were joining the select few.

"I've wanted to get them for quite a while," Rivers said.

She went to the salon with her mom, Kristi, who totally gets it.

"My dad on the other hand, he's so confused," Rivers said. "I told him what I was doing and he said: `Why would you get feathers in your hair?'"

Five Places Where the Bubble May Burst

Bubbles are a beautiful thing to watch while they're inflating or floating along, but they can be extremely messy when they burst.

The U.S. still hasn't recovered from the real estate bubble that burst in 2007. Considering the somewhat tenuous state of the second coming of tech spending, the bubbling costs of college inflation, the seemingly limitless heights of gold prices and the ever-expanding demand for health care as baby boomers ease into retirement, there may be another bubble just around the bend.

Don't tell that to Las Vegas, which is still trying to pick up the pieces after the housing bubble's pop shattered its real estate industry. Average home prices dropped from $220,000 in 2008 to just $128,000 in the first quarter of this year. As a result, a 3.21% foreclosure rate quoted for the area by RealtyTrac is still the highest in the nation. The good news is that foreclosure rate is a 11.54% improvement from fall of last year. The bad news is that it's only a 7.74% upgrade from the same period last year, is still costing more homeowners their properties than anywhere in America and is having a residual effect on business, with traffic down at McCarran Airport and once-untouchable businesses such as the Sahara casino closing, its owners cited the crisis as a reason.

The Street took a look at five regions that lean heavily on one industry and at just how much they stand to lose should their bubble be the next to go:

Lincoln, Neb.
Unemployment rate: 4.1%
Largest employer: The University of Nebraska

As a state capital, Lincoln is usually shielded from the worst effects of bubbles and recessions. As with other state capitals, including Austin, Texas, and Madison, Wis., however, a big part of its stability comes from housing the state's university.

The University of Nebraska employs nearly twice as many people in Lincoln as the state government, and while it's a big part of the reason Lincoln's unemployment rate has fared relatively well compared with that of the rest of the country, it's could also be a weakness if higher education costs ever find a ceiling. According to the nonprofit College Board's annual study of college costs, the average tuition and fees at U.S. public universities have increased at an average of 5.6% per year beyond the rate of inflation. That includes a 9.3% increase in 2009-10 at the height of the recession. As enrollment at state schools rose 33% within the past decade, per-student appropriations dropped 19%.

When those institutions employ large swaths of a city's populace and are under attack, including from low-cost competitors among two-year institutions and a burgeoning online education industry, towns such as Boulder, Colo., Ann Arbor, Mich., and, yes, Lincoln have reason to be concerned.

Killeen-Temple-Fort Hood, Texas
Unemployment rate: 7.9%
Largest employer: U.S. Army

Thinking Fort Hood is immune to military budget fluctuations just because the First Cavalry, 3rd Armored and roughly 65,000 soldiers, supporting staff and families call it home is like dismissing an Army without tanks. Considering the depth of cuts Defense Secretary Robert Gates wanted to make even before Osama bin Laden was killed, all options should be considered on the table.

With politicians from both parties discussing drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan in the wake of bin Laden's death, communities such as Navy-dependent Jacksonville, Fla., and Air Force base-adjacent San Bernardino, Calif., and Valparaiso, Fla., have reason to believe those conflicts and U.S. commitment in Libya represent a military spending bubble. Gates wants $100 billion to come out of the now $690 billion defense budget within the next five years, but the cuts haven't hit the bases so far.

While he's already "determined that we will not repeat what we did in the 1970s and 1990s, which is across-the-board cuts that end up hollowing out the force," ask the folks in Lima, Ohio, how seriously he's considering cuts. For those who know Lima only from episodes of Fox's Glee, it's also home to the General Dynamics' Joint Systems Manufacturing Center, which makes the M1A1 Abrams tank and the Marines' Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle. Gates wants to cease production at the plant in 2013-16 to save roughly $1 billion -- marking the first break in U.S. tank production since 1941.

Much of Gates' cuts are targeted toward weapons programs, but he has also called for shrinking the size of the Army and the Marine Corps and hacking the Pentagon budget down to less than 1% growth next year. With political sentiment shifting away from spending of nearly any sort as the U.S. hit its debt ceiling, military communities such as that surrounding Fort Hood shouldn't be surprised when those cuts hit home.

San Jose/San Francisco/Silicon Valley
Unemployment rate: 10.3%
Largest employers: A patchwork of technology companies

If any community knows just how quickly the tech tide can turn, it's San Jose. After the tech boom of the late 1990s pushed the Nasdaq to 5,132.52 in March 2000 and its subsequent collapse drove it to below 2,500 by that December, Silicon Valley high-tech industries dropped off by 17% and roughly 85,000 jobs just disappeared by 2008, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Jobs in the Internet community, telecom and data processing alone declined 26% between 2000- 08.

San Jose, San Francisco and the rest of Silicon Valley are bracing for Round 2 as companies such as Farmville maker Zynga and Twitter are IPO gossip fodder while even mainstays including Google, Cisco and Intel are eyeing advances by Apple and purchases by Microsoft before making their next move. Though the amount of venture capital flowing in for the little guys last year is less than a quarter of the $8.5 billion that came rushing into Silicon Valley at the peak of the tech boom, according to Thompson Reuters, Tesla's IPO last year, the rising star of Facebook's still 20-something Mark Zuckerberg and the renewed presence of big money and big risk in the air still has locals and some investors nervous.

Pittsburgh, Pa.
Unemployment rate: 7.4%
Largest employer: The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center

It's almost a shame a town so hard hit by the industrial decline of the late 1970s and early 1980s has become a perfect storm of bubbles. The University of Pittsburgh is still one of the town's largest employers, the empty manufacturing facilities are being populated by tech startups and arguably the biggest employer in town is the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center -- which is, yes, separate from the university from which it takes its name.

The last may be the most volatile of Pittsburgh's three rivers of revenue, as Pittsburgh and other health care heavy towns such as Augusta, Ga., and Boston may not have to wait for the baby boomers to blow through to see their bubble burst. According to health care consulting firm Millman, American families insured through their jobs are racking up an average of $19,393 in health care costs, up 7.3% from last year.

In fewer than nine years, the cost of health care has more than doubled. Hospital spending, which is only 48% of total health care spending, accounts for 60% of the increase. If you consider this kind of growth unsustainable, join the club.

The nation's still sharply divided over President Barack Obama's health care law and none of this posturing has cut so much as a cent from costs, and communities that lean heavily on their hospitals will bear the brunt of it. Pittsburgh knows this too well already; a University of Pittsburgh Medical Center hospital in its Braddock neighborhood was closed just last year.

Elko, Nev.
Unemployment rate: 7.9%
Largest employers: Barrick and Newmont mining companies

We recently mentioned little Elko and its population of less than 20,000 as an example of a town whose one biggest asset -- the gold it's sitting on -- got it through the recession. While that precious commodity has kept Elko's unemployment rate at roughly half that of Nevada as a whole, it's also a volatile and finite resource than takes as much as it gives.

Gold's trading at roughly $1,490 an ounce, which is a whole lot better than the $561.50 it was fetching five years ago, but well down from a high of nearly $1,565 per ounce in April. Unfortunately for gold and, eventually, for Elko, a good economy is bad for gold prices.

Few places know this better than Elko, where plummeting gold prices dropped to less than $265 per ounce between 1999 and 2001 and forced the mining companies to cut back on jobs and the city to cut back on services.

"Gold is a boom and bust industry," Curtis Calder, Elko's city manager, told Fortune in 2009. "When the rest of the economy drops, the price of gold goes up. We're pretty vibrant right now."

That's the best advice a boom or bubble town can get: Savor the now.

13-year-old killed by pitch in Arizona Little League game

Tragedy struck in Winslow, Ariz. on Wednesday morning when a 13-year-old Little Leaguer died hours after being struck by a pitch in the middle of a game.

According to the Associated Press as well as a variety of Arizona outlets including ABC 15 News, Hayden Walton was struck by a pitch in the chest when he turned to bunt during a game on Tuesday night. The pitch reportedly struck the middle schooler in the chest, directly over his heart. That stopped his heart entirely; a condition medically referred to as commotio cordis, according to ABC 15.

"He took an inside pitch right in the chest," Winslow Little League official Jamey Jones told the AP. "After that he took two steps to first base and collapsed."

Walton was almost immediately transported to the nearest hospital, but he never recovered and was pronounced dead on Wednesday morning. The Winslow Little League suspended all games until Friday as a result and the incident was kept under wraps while those closest with the Walton family grieved for the loss of a young member of the Winslow community. Understandably, the Walton parents -- who also have a young daughter -- have been unwilling to speak to the press because of their shock and grief.

That sense of tragedy has been shared by members of Little League's national branch, where Steve Keener, the president and CEO of Little League Baseball and Softball, released a statement offering up condolences for all those connected with the tragedy.

"Words cannot adequately express our sorrow on the passing of Hayden," Keener told the AP. "Our thoughts and prayers go out to Hayden's family, all the players and volunteers of the Winslow Little League, his classmates, and his friends, at this difficult time.

"The loss of a child is incomprehensible."

While Hayden Walton loved playing sports, he was also considered a rising pillar of the community for performing a variety of good deeds. He was a Boy Scout and, notably, mowed lawns and pitched in on odd jobs like taking out the trash for older widowed women who lived in his neighborhood.

As of Friday night, no news about when or where Walton would be buried had been released. In the meantime, the Winslow community will continue to grieve over what can only be considered an overpowering and shocking loss.

"It's a hard thing to handle for everyone," Walton family spokesman Dale Thomas told the AP. "When you're touched by something of this magnitude, it sends shock waves throughout the community."