September 22, 2004

That fall of 2004, gas ran $1.88 a gallon and Bush was in the White House — and American troops were fighting to retake the Iraqi city of Fallujah from insurgents who had held it for months. On television, audiences were tuning into "Lost" for its gripping first season, while Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" was sitting at the top of the fiction bestseller list for the second straight year. The Boston Red Sox ended their 86-year World Series drought by defeating the St. Louis Cardinals, and the European Space Agency made history when its SMART-1 probe became the first European satellite to reach lunar orbit.