October 26, 1980

That fall of 1980, gas ran $1.19 a gallon and Carter was in the White House — the Iranian hostage crisis was still grinding through its second year, with diplomatic back-channels active and Reagan's landslide victory in November signaling a sharp turn in the country's political direction. On the radio, Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" was the number-one song in the country, and at the movies, audiences were turning out in large numbers for "Private Benjamin," the Goldie Hawn comedy that would go on to earn an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. The Philadelphia Phillies won their first World Series championship that October by defeating the Kansas City Royals, and in November, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft made its closest pass of Saturn, flying within 77,000 miles of the planet's cloud tops and transmitting the first detailed, high-resolution images of Saturn and its rings back to scientists on Earth.