Born in 1960

If you were born in 1960, you arrived at the beginning of an era that would shake everything loose. John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon debated on television—the first-ever televised presidential debate—and everyone who watched on TV thought Kennedy won, while everyone who heard it on radio thought Nixon held his own.

Television had just changed politics forever and nobody had time to process it because Kennedy won the election in November and suddenly the country had a young, vital president with a beautiful wife and a kind of luminous promise that felt almost too good. "The Twist" by Chubby Checker hit and American dancing shed its formality in a single glorious hip rotation. *Psycho* made going to the movies into something new—people screamed and some fainted and everyone talked about it for weeks.

The sit-ins at Woolworth's lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina opened the new decade with a clear moral challenge. Motown was cranking out its first hits. The new suburban ranch house had a color television in the den and a Rambler in the driveway and a Polaroid camera ready for the holidays.

A first-class stamp was four cents. Gas was thirty-one cents a gallon. America was young and rich and complicated and it was about to find out just how complicated.