October 17, 1994

That fall of 1994, gas ran $1.11 a gallon and Clinton was in the White House — the United States and its allies were watching Iraq mass troops on the Kuwaiti border, forcing a rapid Pentagon deployment to the Gulf that raised real questions about how long America would need to maintain a military presence in the region. On the cultural front, Boyz II Men's "I'll Make Love To You" was dominating radio while John Grisham's "The Chamber" sat at the top of the fiction bestseller lists, giving Americans plenty to listen to and read as the season turned. The Houston Rockets had claimed the NBA championship that summer, and that November, passengers boarded the first Eurostar trains to pass through the Channel Tunnel, completing a physical link between Britain and continental Europe that engineers had been imagining for over two centuries.