Born in 1975

If you were born in 1975, you arrived in the year that closed the Vietnam chapter for good. The last American helicopter lifted off the roof of the Saigon embassy in April in images of desperate, chaotic finality. The country looked away and tried to process it, and mostly couldn't, and filed it in a place that would take decades to open.

Domestically, the mood was strange—inflation, recession, malaise, a Ford presidency that felt like a holding pattern. And yet: *Jaws* arrived in June and invented the summer blockbuster, queues around the multiplex, John Williams's two-note theme making every trip to the beach complicated. Saturday Night Live debuted in October with George Carlin as host, Chevy Chase falling down as Gerald Ford, and a raw, anarchic new comedy that felt like it had broken through the television screen from somewhere hipper.

Bruce Springsteen's *Born to Run* was the record that said something true about working-class American longing. CB radio was everywhere—Convoy was on AM radio and every trucker had a handle. Hot pants and platform shoes and macramé.

Pet rocks hit the stores in August and Gary Dahl became a millionaire in time for Christmas, which explained something about American consumer psychology that no economist quite could. *One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest* swept the Oscars. The country was muddling through beautifully.