Bobby Hull of the Chicago Black Hawks broke hockey’s single-season scoring record, slapping home his fifty-first goal on March 12 against the New York Rangers to best his previous high of fifty, reached in 1962. The Chicago forward would finish the season with fifty-four goals.

The same day, Barry Sadler’s “The Ballad of the Green Berets” entered radio’s Top Forty. The tribute to the Special Forces achieved number-one status later that year, driven as much by strong feelings over the American presence in Vietnam as by any virtues of the tune itself. Two years later it served as the anthem for The Green Berets , a John Wayne war movie, which outgrossed all of the star’s other films. Barry Sadler, a former combat medic in the Special Forces, sold nine million copies of the tribute and wrote more than twenty novels about mercenary soldiers over the years. He later trained rebels in Nicaragua and Guatemala, where he was shot in an apparent robbery in 1988. Partially paralyzed in the shooting, Sadler died as a result the following year.

After grudgingly ruling on March 21 that Fanny Hill: The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure was not without “redeeming social value,” the Supreme Court that same day also decided the case of magazine publisher Ralph Ginzburg, upholding a Philadelphia court’s conviction on charges of distributing obscene materials by mail.

Ginzburg had worked as a freelance writer and photographer and wrote briefly for television before taking charge of circulation promotion at Look when he was twenty-three. He became an editor at Esquire in 1956, and there he took an article of his own and turned it into the best-selling book An Unhurried View of Erotica . From this came the idea for Eros magazine, a hard-bound quarterly that he launched in the early sixties. It was the advertising for Eros , not its glib sexuality (Ginzburg chose addresses in towns such as Middlesex and Intercourse, for example, for mailing his magazine), that later swayed the opinions of five of the judges.

“We view the publication against a background of commercial exploitation of erotica solely for the sake of their prurient appeal,” wrote Justice William Brennan for the majority. “The leer of the sensualist also permeates the advertising.”

Ginzburg had been fined twenty-eight thousand dollars and sentenced to five years in jail in the decision the Court was upholding. The Ginzburg case was part of the developing “prurient-interest” standard used by the Court in a series of obscenity cases. After serving a reduced term, Ginzburg published Castrated: My Eight Months in Prison , in 1971.

To inaugurate the cool, modern hall Philip Johnson had designed for it, the New York City Opera, which had become one of the nation’s leading opera companies, chose to present a twelve-tone opera. On the night