A young woman we know writes:
Thirty years ago, Russia got the bomb; the Polaroid Land Camera was introduced, and sold for $89.75; the Methodist Church in the United States and Cuba had eight million six hundred and fifty-one thousand and sixty-two members; Tyrone Power married Linda Christian the day his divorce from a French film actress came through; Mickey Rooney married Martha Vickers the day his divorce from Betty Jane Rase came through; Lucille Ball remarried Desi Arnaz; Lady Astor said women should make the world safe for men; a survey found women in London too tired for social life; Dr. Benjamin Pasamanik was given the Lester N. Hofheimer Research Award (fifteen hundred dollars) for a study showing that Negroes had the same mental capacity as whites; Bill W., co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, told some psychiatrists that he had stopped drinking after accepting God; one of the five copies of the Gettysburg Address in Abraham Lincoln’s
own handwriting was sold to a Cuban at an auction for $54,000; Emperor Hirohito of Japan wrote a book about sea slugs, An Illustrated Study of Opisthobranchiata in Sagami Bay; a Gallup Poll found that the funniest American comedians were Bob Hope, Milton Berle, Jack Benny, Red Skelton, and Fibber McGee and Molly; the lost city of Peshawarun, Afghanistan, once used as a garrison by soldiers of Alexander the Great, was found; a broken plaster statuette of St. Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary, wept when Shirley Anne Martin, eleven years old, kissed it; Princess Margaret Rose of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was appointed head of the Girl Guides Sea Rangers; the Detroit Symphony cancelled its season because its musicians wouldn’t take a cut in pay; Ruth Williams, an ex-stenographer from London, joined her new husband, Seretse Khama, Chief-designate of Bechuanaland’s Samwangwato tribe; George Bernard Shaw said, “It is useless to go on ignoring the patent fact that Stalin is obviously the ablest statesman in Europe”; I was born.
That I was born thirty years ago doesn’t seem to matter to anyone except my mother, my father, their families, and their friends. When I say to someone, “Thirty years ago, I was born,” I can almost hear this running through their minds: “Yes. Yes. So you were born.”
—July 23, 1979