December 19, 1969

By the winter of 1969, Nixon was in the White House and the federal minimum wage stood at $1.60/hr — the U.S. was still deep in the Vietnam War, with American troops receiving direct orders on the proper treatment of civilians as military and diplomatic pressure mounted on multiple fronts. On the cultural front, Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" was the number one song in the country, and Philip Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint" was sitting at the top of the fiction bestseller list. The New York Mets had pulled off one of the most stunning upsets in baseball history by defeating the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series that fall, and on February 9th, the Boeing 747 took its first flight out of Everett, Washington, introducing the jumbo jet era to commercial aviation.