Born in 1948

If you were born in 1948, you came into a country in the middle of an election nobody expected to end the way it did. Harry Truman, given up for dead politically, held a Gallup-poll-defying upset over Thomas Dewey, and the photograph of him holding up the wrong headline became immortal. The Berlin Airlift was the first great test of the Cold War, American C-47s running the gauntlet of Soviet pressure around the clock—it played on the radio news like a nail-biting serial.

At home, though, the boom was real and sweet-smelling. New cars were rolling off the lines with those first modest tail fins, and a new Chevrolet ran about $1,500 if you could find one. The LP record had just been invented by Columbia, which meant you could hear a whole symphony without flipping the disc every four minutes.

In the towns and cities, TV sets were multiplying—the first televised political conventions happened this year, and suddenly politics had a whole new visual dimension. Milton Berle's *Texaco Star Theater* was pulling in audiences of millions on Tuesday nights. Kids were trading comics, building model planes from balsa kits, and playing sandlot baseball from April to October.

The diner counter at the corner still offered the blue-plate special for fifty cents, and a cherry phosphate at the soda fountain was the height of a Saturday afternoon. America was booming, building, and watching the world very carefully.