Born in 1959

If you were born in 1959, you entered a country at the peak of its chrome-plated, fin-tailed, TV-watching postwar confidence, though the cracks in the facade were just beginning to show. Alaska and Hawaii became the 49th and 50th states, completing the map. Fidel Castro rode into Havana in January, ninety miles from Florida, which made the evening news very interesting.

"Mack the Knife" by Bobby Darin was the song of the summer, and Motown Records was being founded in Detroit by Berry Gordy with an $800 loan. The quiz show scandal broke—*Twenty-One* contestant Charles Van Doren admitted on camera that he'd been fed the answers—and the country's faith in television's innocence took a hit. Barbie debuted at the New York Toy Fair in her black-and-white swimsuit and changed the imagination of American girlhood forever.

*Ben-Hur* was the year's spectacular picture and won eleven Oscars. The Guggenheim Museum opened in New York, Frank Lloyd Wright's nautilus spiral stopping pedestrians on Fifth Avenue cold. The St.

Lawrence Seaway opened, connecting the Great Lakes to the Atlantic. Everything seemed big that year—big cars, big buildings, big ambitions. The family had a TV set, a new car in the garage, and a mortgage on a house in a development with a name like Pleasantview Estates.

Life was comfortable, prosperous, and about to be questioned in ways nobody had quite anticipated.