(FORTUNE Magazine) – "... In the great expansion of the metropolitan areas the subdivisions of one city are beginning to meet up with the subdivisions of another." New development near San Francisco, from "Urban Sprawl," January 1958

Poker: An All-American Game

What scientists since Aristotle have tried and failed to do has all the time been done by the gamecocks of mankind, and that is to design a "controlled experiment" of human action, a kind of laboratory of man's experience. Like the law of gravity and all great thoughts, it is quite simple and has always been in plain view. The laboratory is the game and a laboratory of capitalism is poker.

--John McDonald, March 1948

The CEO's Second Wife

Any ambitious manager with the top job in his sights used to know better than to ruin his chances with an untimely divorce.... "The change has been radical," observes Helen Singer Kaplan, 60, a psychiatrist and the second wife of Charles Lazarus, 65, founder and chairman of Toys "R" Us. "There's no longer a prejudice against divorce and remarriage--almost the reverse. In some cases the man with the old, nice, matronly first wife is looked down on. He's seen as not keeping up appearances. Why can't he do better for himself?" Powerful men are beginning to demand trophy wives.

--October 1989

Even if part of the American Dream is still true, one big chunk of it is dead, finished, kaput. For the future will be determined not by the independent entrepreneur or the "rugged individualist" whom our folklore so venerates; the future will be determined by Organization Man.... By deliberately exposing a man to a succession of environments, they best obtain that necessity of the large organization--the man who can fit in anywhere. "The training," as an I.B.M. executive succinctly puts it, "makes our men interchangeable."

-- William H. Whyte Jr., "The Transients," May 1953

Mathematician John Nash (later a Nobel laureate and subject of the movie "A Beautiful Mind") at MIT, from "Mathematics: The New Uses of the Abstract," July 1958

Research by Kate Bonamici and Chris Zappone