Zack Bowen introduces University of Miami Chemistry profess Carl H. Snyder, who gives a humorous lecture and a slide show. He explains that he was born in 1932, during the Great Depression and Herber Hoover's presidency. He begins with the headline from the New York Times announcing that Franklin D. Roosevelt had been elected president. Snyder talks about his personal reactions to some major events of World War II and, later, hearing that Vietnam had split into North Vietnam and South Vietnam and that school segregation had been banned in the U.S. He talks about how the short Kennedy era of the 1960s differed from the Eisenhower and Truman era of the 1950s. Snyder describes seeing tanks driving down US1 just before the first American clash with the Soviet Union over Cuba at the Bay of Pigs and his shock at hearing of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He says he believes that the 1960s began with the death of Kennedy.