Born in 1973

If you were born in 1973, you were born into the year America finally came to terms with Vietnam. The Paris Peace Accords were signed in January and the troops started coming home—not in triumph, not with ticker tape, but quietly, in a kind of national exhale that didn't know what to do with itself. Watergate was now the daily drama—the Senate hearings were on television all summer, and the question "What did the president know and when did he know it?

" entered the permanent American vocabulary. Then in October the Arab oil embargo hit, and suddenly the gas lines at the pumps stretched around the block, odd-even rationing based on your license plate, and the American love affair with cheap fuel hit its first real wall. *American Graffiti* was the hit film—a warm nostalgic look at 1962 that told you something about how America was feeling about the present.

The Sears Tower in Chicago opened as the world's tallest building. Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in straight sets in the "Battle of the Sexes" in the Houston Astrodome, and it felt like more than a tennis match. *The Exorcist* sent audiences out into the winter cold trembling.

Jim Croce was killed in a plane crash in September. Carole King, Elton John, and the emerging singer-songwriters were the sound of private American feeling.