Then came the last year of postwar innocence. “What can you say,” John Glenn exclaimed after orbiting the globe, “about a day when you have seen four beautiful sunsets?” Mickey Mantle won the Most Valuable Player award; John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Intellectuals and Hollywood directors still showcased cigarette smoke as a positive image, paying little attention to obscure health warnings from Britain’s Royal College of Physicians. The first of the baby-boom children turned sixteen, snatched up their driver’s licenses, and created a new stage of life within Detroit’s shiny
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