Word: bmws
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...weekday morning out on Route 31, between Pets of Pennington and Party Things!, the Jazzercise center is alive and humming. Driving everything from BMWs to Toyota pickups, women arrive for class with coffee mugs in hand. The class is a mix of violin teachers, novelists, horse breeders and substitute teachers who range in age from 20 to 60. Some drop off preschool children at the center's nursery; others gather in small groups to discuss someone's vacation tan and the pros and cons of buying a car for a 17-year...
Enter the four Chambers brothers -- Larry, Billy Joe, Willie Lee and Otis -- who blew into their old hometown driving gleaming BMWs and Camaros, sporting gold chains and fancy clothes. When they offered ambitious young men $2,000 a month to return with them to Detroit, they had no shortage of takers. Over four years, some 150 young men, most between the ages of 17 and 21, made the trip north. Recalls Michael Vondran Jr., 17: "People were saying, 'I'm going to Detroit, I'm going to Detroit.' No one really knew what they were getting into...
From Washington to New York City, new cars join the flow, upscale Volvos and BMWs. Turning off to the New Jersey Turnpike, the road becomes a delta, flattening, spreading out, careening and jostling forward at 55 m.p.h. The trucks are shunted off to a side lane and traveling along, nose to tail, bumper to bumper, they look like . . . yes! . . . a train! Remember trains? Surely trains were more sensible than this, a 20th century folly, this stampede of steel roaring toward the Lincoln Tunnel...
...when the fall came, so did a few smirks, along with jokes about yuppie brokers losing their BMWs. But mainly the reaction was personal: What did the crash mean for me, my pension, my mortgage, my business, my job, my tuition bills? Most of the momentous events that splash their headlines for history can be viewed dispassionately from afar. Not a Wall Street panic, however, not even for those who don't play the market...
...giddy rise of the stock market, no figures have been so celebrated -- and so scorned -- as the precocious young brokers and investment bankers reveling in million-dollar co-ops, BMWs and American Express Gold Cards. These are the yuppies, the generation of boastful baby boomers who had never before known a bear market. But last week's wild market gyrations, coming on top of recent layoffs on Wall Street, have left them breathless. "All of a sudden, people in my age group have come of age," says Ian Wiener, 26, a portfolio manager for Clemente Capital, a Manhattan money-management...