Born in 1949

If you were born in 1949, you arrived in a year of anxious contradictions. The economy was dipping into a mild recession, and the news from overseas was unsettling—China had fallen to the Communists, and in September the Soviets tested their own atomic bomb. The phrase "we have the Bomb" suddenly lost its reassuring quality.

But on Main Street, life went on in its particular American way—a gallon of milk for twenty-one cents, a box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes from the new supermarkets that were replacing the corner grocery. Death of a Salesman opened on Broadway and hit something deep in the American chest. *All About Eve* was coming and *The Third Man* was doing brisk business at the Rialto.

But it was television that was truly reshaping daily life: one million sets were now in American homes, and *Hopalong Cassidy* was sending every kid in the country running for a cowboy hat. Arthur Godfrey and Milton Berle were the kings of the living room. Nat King Cole's "Mona Lisa" was on every radio.

The first Polaroid camera went on sale in Boston and cost ninety dollars—a miracle that delivered a picture in sixty seconds. Subdivision houses were sprouting across Long Island and New Jersey and California, all of them with a little patch of lawn and a carport and a dream of the good life, just barely out of reach and yet somehow within it all.