David Crary

NEW YORK -- On the wall of Ralph Nader's office hangs a color portrait of baseball legend Lou Gehrig, an old-fashioned hero who seems to rebuke so much of today's sports world -- the sex-abuse and drug scandals, labor strife, rampant commercialization.

Gehrig, who set a standard for durability while playing 2,130 consecutive games over 15 seasons, is the only sports idol acknowledged by Nader, himself a kind of "Iron Horse" in his chosen playing field, America's consumer movement.

COOLBAUGH, Pa. -- Barry Warner has loved wildlife since boyhood, and lived out his dream of becoming a conservation officer. He sees no contradiction in the fact that he's also a lifelong trapper, skilled at capturing wild animals and, if appropriate, killing them as part of an avocation that many Americans view as barbarous.

Here in the township of Coolbaugh, on the edge of a vast track of state game land in northeast Pennsylvania, he's in his element. He demonstrates an array of traps unloaded from the back of his truck, reviews his 37-year career with the state game commission, from which he resigned as regional director in 2007, and recounts his periodic forays to North Carolina to trap bobcats, beaver and buck-toothed, wetland-dwelling nutria.

"Some people think trappers don't care about wildlife," says Warner. "It was my love for it that took me into this career. I don't want to see anything suffer."

NEW YORK -- Good times, on the race course and off, are the essence of Front Runners New York, a club representing hundreds of gay and lesbian runners in the nation's biggest city.

Yet that's only part of its story.