March 26, 1969

Gas cost $0.35 a gallon in the spring of 1969, and the Dow Jones stood at 800 — as American troop levels in Vietnam had surpassed 540,000 and Secretary of State William Rogers was telling senators that a U.S. withdrawal depended on reciprocal action by North Vietnamese forces. On the radio, "Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In (The Flesh Failures)" by The 5th Dimension was the country's top song, while Philip Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint" was flying off bookstore shelves as the number one fiction bestseller. The Boston Celtics closed out the decade by defeating the Los Angeles Lakers for the NBA championship, and on May 18, NASA launched Apollo 10, sending astronauts Gene Cernan, Tom Stafford, and John Young to within 15 kilometers of the lunar surface in a full dress rehearsal for the Moon landing that would follow that summer.