September 9, 1967

That fall of 1967, gas ran $0.33 a gallon and Johnson was in the White House — the Vietnam War was dominating headlines, with Johnson defending the air campaign and facing growing pressure from Congress to limit his authority to deploy troops. On movie screens, Sidney Poitier was drawing crowds in "To Sir, with Love," and on the radio, a Memphis teenager named Alex Chilton was singing lead on The Box Tops' "The Letter," the country's top song. The St. Louis Cardinals defeated the Boston Red Sox in a seven-game World Series, and that same fall, test pilot William J. Knight pushed an X-15 research aircraft to Mach 6.7, setting an unofficial world speed record for a fixed-wing aircraft that still stands today.