Young smokers beware: On Monday, it became illegal in Iowa for anyone under 18 to smoke a cigarette. If 41 smoking, chewing or even possessing tobacco by the police, an under-aged offender could be  42  as much as $100, yanked off the street or out of the shopping mall and taken home in the backseat of a police car. The law is part of the state’s campaign to  43  tobacco use greatly among all Iowans. The police are ordered to enforce the law, but some are skeptical. On their long list of priorities, this measure shares a spot with the neighbor’s cat stuck in a tree. “We’re  44  busy to enforce a law like that,” said the Des Moines Police Department. Forty-four states have laws that ban selling cigarettes to minors or 45 minors from possessing tobacco, but these laws are rarely enforced.

        If you were a well-heeled Massachusetts lady in the late 1920s and wanted your hair fixed like the moviestars, there was one man to turn to: Samuel Bernstein. In 1927, this entrepreneurial immigrant, who had arrivedin New York from Tsarist Russia,  26  the only local license to sell the machine for curling hair. Like manybusinessmen of the times, he expected his eldest son to follow him into the family firm. 

        But Louis Bernstein, known to everyone as Lenny (he officially changed his name to Leonard as ateenager), had different ideas. The family had no musical roots, but ten-year-old Lenny found himself drawnobsessively to his aunt’s piano. No matter that his father remained vehemently  27  the notion that heshould make music his life, there was but one path ahead. 

        For all his early misgivings, Samuel later  28  that his son was a genius. In his passport, LeonardBernstein simply called himself a “musician”—characteristic humility from a man whose broad   29  areunique in musical history. Bernstein was a conductor whose interpretive gifts over the course of five decadesshone light on the classics from Haydn to Mahler, Bartok to Stravinsky. He was a fine concert pianist andpioneering broadcaster; an educator, Harvard lecturer, writer and humanitarian; a husband, father, lover. Sucha  30  life was not without complexities, contradictions and critics—but oh, what a life.