"De Anza College came to life on the cusp of great change in America. An entering freshman in 1967 could have written a “What did you do last summer?” essay on the Summer of Love, just concluded. A prophet would have found portents in the opening day of classes, September 11. That same freshman, one of the 3,000 students that first semester, would have seen news about the Six Day War over the Suez Canal between Israel and Egypt, call-ups of more troops for Vietnam, race riots in Detroit, Spanish Harlem, and Birmingham, Alabama, the deaths of astronauts Grissom, White, and Chaffee in a space launch test fire, and the swearing in of Thurgood Marshall as the first black U. S. Supreme Court Justice. American physicists discovered the quark, English astronomers discovered pulsars, and a South African physician performed the first heart transplant. Top movies were “The Graduate,” “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” “In the Heat of the Night,” and “Bonnie and Clyde.” The music charts were led by The Monkees’ “Daydream Believer,” Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” The Doors’ “Light My Fire”, The Supremes’ “The Happening,” and the Beatles’ “Penny Lane,” yet the Grammy for record of the year went to Frank Sinatra for “Strangers in the Night.” World population was 3.485 billion. The unemployment rate in the United States was 3.8%. An average house cost $40,000, a new car $2,425, and the average income was $6,120 a year. Milk was $1.15 a gallon; a loaf of bread 22 cents; a gallon of gas 28 cents; and a first-class stamp cost a nickel. St. Louis defeated Boston in seven games in the World Series. The Packers defeated the Chiefs in the first ever Super Bowl. The Pulitzer Prize in fiction went to Bernard Malamud for The Fixer, Marianne Moore published her Complete Poems, and Richard Brautigan sold a lot of copies of Trout Fishing in America. The Nobel Prize for literature went to Miguel Angel Asturias of Guatemala. Spencer Tracy, Upton Sinclair, and Ernesto “Che” Guevara died that year. Many of the new currents running through American life became intertwined with the college’s programs, its students, its faculty, and its staff: the burgeoning civil rights movements; a growing consciousness about the roles of women; a deepening political divide over America’s role in the world, especially in Vietnam; the dawn of the personal computer and the technological revolution we now call the Information Age; a sharpened environmental awareness; and a variety of cultural and social changes that have reshaped our notions of family."