1970 was a poor time to be on the academic job market. The postwar expansion of higher education, that had created so many jobs for recipients of a doctorate, was ending. The country was not only in the midst of deep divisions over an unpopular war and protests over race, but the beginnings of a sharp contraction of the economy that would see an end to unprecedented prosperity that followed the world war. The children of the greatest generation’s middle classes, like me, had grown up without ever being able to imagine the scarcity or insecurity that our parents remembered from their experience of the Great Depression and war. America became a consumer’s paradise for its rapidly expanding middle class. Where this left a cohort of recent or about to be Doctors of Philosophy was up in the air. For me, the situation projected all the insecurities and confusions I possessed. The Age of Aquarius was no paradise, at least for me.