Born in 1970

If you were born in 1970, you arrived in the first year of a new decade that couldn't quite shed the weight of the previous one. In May, National Guard troops shot and killed four student protesters at Kent State University in Ohio, and the photograph of a young woman kneeling over a body on the ground became one of the most shattering images of the era. Vietnam was still the open wound.

Nixon was in the White House, appearing on *Laugh-In* and generally seeming out of place in the culture. But the culture was alive and strange and proliferating: the first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22nd and twenty million Americans participated, the environmental movement suddenly a mass phenomenon. Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin both died that fall at twenty-seven.

The Beatles officially broke up in April—Paul's announcement landing like a small bereavement across an entire generation. Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water" was the song of the year. M*A*S*H opened as a movie, biting and antiwar.

Monday Night Football launched on ABC, and Howard Cosell's voice filled living rooms from coast to coast every autumn Monday. Knee-high boots and hot pants were in fashion. Pet rocks were still a few years away, but the mood ring was coming.

There was a frayed, searching quality to American life—hunting for the next thing after all the intensity of the sixties had burned through.