The Chair-Man of the Boardwalk Isn’t Pushy at All

Atlantic City’s rolling chairs, once almost extinct, have recovered, thanks to Larry Belfer, a 32-year-old entrepreneur who dresses in designer suits and prefers getting around the city now in his Mercedes-Benz. “I don’t push the chairs--it’s not me,” he said. Three years ago he was looking for a way out from behind a casino hotel’s front desk, when he remembered the rolling chair, invented in 1887 by William Hayday, a hardware store owner who saw a way to make a buck by helping invalids get a cure-all of salt air along the boardwalk. When healthy tourists began faking illness for the pleasure of being pushed, the “wicker on wheels” trade took off. By the 1920s, the chairs had become a licensed industry. But as Atlantic City’s fortunes declined, so did the chairs’. With the advent of casinos, Belfer detected a void and found several chairs “piled as junk in a garage.” He bought them, repaired them and hired “operators”--college students dressed in white shirts, black pants and red bow ties. He rents them to the operators for about $35 a day, and whatever they collect in what has once again become a competitive business is profit. A ride costs $5 for up to 10 blocks and $10 for a half hour.

--Farther down the Atlantic Coast, at Palm Beach, Fla., resides another entrepreneur, Lisa Tanner, who last year created designer trash bags. The dregs of everyday life had bothered her. “You know how you see those garbage bags down a street? It looked really tacky--the green bags, the white bags. Sort of plain, sort of dull,” she said. She estimates that 50,000 bags were sold in about 260 stores nationwide over five months, at a suggested retail price of $3 for a package of six. Each thick, vanilla-colored bag is adorned with one of eight prints: green palm trees, blue tennis rackets, pink palm trees, red sailboats, green golf flags, pink flower baskets, red Scotch terriers or pine-green alligators. Tanner’s husband, a utility supervisor, was reluctant to part with his first bag. “He took the trash out, and he brought the bag back,” she said.

--Mr. T, born Lawrence Tureaud, the burly former bodyguard who starred in NBC’s “The A-Team,” is cutting a swath through the wealthy Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, Ill. Neighbors say that someone at Mr. T’s four-acre estate cranked up a chain saw recently and about 100 firs and hardwoods, some of them more than a century old, have fallen. “I believe a man’s home is his castle, but if Mr. T does not like trees he chose the wrong town to move to,” said Carl Kitzerow, Mr. T’s neighbor.