The nation’s most populous state in the 1950 Census – based four years and a day before I was born – contained just 14.8 million people, 4 million more than the No. 2 state.

The No. 1 state was New York. No. 2 was California.

New Yorkers, like my parents, don’t like to think of themselves as second in anything. But New York’s status as No. 1, something it had held since 1820, was in jeopardy.

California’s population more than doubled between 1940 and 1960, the last time it was second. By 1970, it had taken over the top spot and has held it since.

With California’s taking over as the most populous state has come its dominance in setting the tone of day-to-day life.

It was exemplified by TV shows. All the quiz shows done in New York moved to California. So did “The Tonight Show,” which on the day I was born was hosted by Steve Allen and aired only in New York.

California’s contributions have their pluses: environmental consciousness, technological innovation, The Beach Boys.

It also has its minuses: freeway congestion, smog, driving too fast

And the shoulder shrug: a casual lifestyle, fast food drivethrus.

There is, to be sure, a lot of California envy in the U.S. – even in the arrogant wilds of New York. 

But, as I recently saw in Arizona, there’s also a lot of antipathy. I saw a sign on a lamppost that decried the way Californians are ruining the state; and one T-shirt tried to belittle the neighbor by showing Arizona with a semi-automatic rifle and California with a phone saying “911.”

Like it or not, California replaced New York as the center of gravity in America after I was born. Whether that will last is an interesting question as California deals with problems such as wildfires, massive rain events and the high cost of living there.

Keep in mind that Thomas Edison’s first incandescent lightbulb came only 75 years before I was born. So 1954 is a little more than halfway to when we are now.

But, in 1954, it would have been hard for my parents to imagine there would be anything other than the kind of bulb that lasted a few months, at best, when you screwed it into a lamp or ceiling fixture.

Or that light bulbs would become political footballs.

The biggest problem with old incandescent bulbs was their relative inefficiency – only about 5% of the energy used to power those bulbs lit a room; the rest was just heat. And not only did they waste electricity, but you needed to replace them often – lightbulbs came in packs of four and six because one was never enough.

Starting in the 1980s, the compact fluorescent bulb – those tubey things – came out to offer far more efficient lighting. But they contained mercury, making them a problem for landfills. In the 2000s, the LED bulb, even more efficient and less of a waste hazard, took hold.

LED lamps last up to 100 times longer than incandescent bulbs – with the added bonus that, with some of them, you can make them change colors.

And the energy they save is considerable. According to the Department of Energy, U.S. electricity usage declined in several of the years before the COVID pandemic as people replaced incandescents with LEDs. Usage is climbing again primarily because computers, not lights, have become larger consumers of energy.

Not everybody loves this. In 2019, the Trump administration rescinded rules that would have accelerated adoption of LED bulbs. They don’t think the light they get is the same brightness — or something.

Which reminds me of a joke.

My parents did their weekly grocery shopping on Saturday nights. My father often worked Saturdays at the Firestone store in Flushing, so Saturday night was often the only time they could go.

The day they couldn’t go was Sunday. Because no supermarket in New York was open on Sunday.

Blue laws, which mandated closing stores on Sundays to honor the Christian Sabbath, were in full force in much of the nation at the time I was born. Not just supermarkets, but department stores and other retailers were shut.

The one place my family could shop on Sundays was near my father’s parents’ house in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn. There, in that heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, stores were closed on Saturday.

But if you were not Christian in other places, tough. The political sway that Christian churches held in those days made the repeal of blue laws a slow process.

It wasn’t until the late 1970s that supermarkets in New York were allowed to open on Sundays. Other retailers joined them soon after.

Blue laws have been erased in most of the nation. But vestiges remain. In some states, alcohol sales are forbidden or restricted on Sundays.

And Bergen County, New Jersey – a shopping mecca Monday through Saturday that’s just a few miles from my home – still prohibits retailers to open their doors on Sunday. Even if, as was the case this past year, Christmas Eve is on a Sunday.

My birthday was 16 days before Easter in 1954.

Easter in New York meant many things. One of the biggest was the arrival of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus to Madison Square Garden, which was then on 8th Avenue and W. 50th Street in Manhattan.

I remember going for the first time when I was six. You walked through the menagerie with the people seen as curiosities. It seemed exploitive and cruel, especially to a kid with weight issues.

But the big attraction was the animals performing tricks in the three rings of the Garden. It smelled a little funky, but people seemed to enjoy it. And besides, it was a tradition; parents take their kids to the circus.

Or maybe not.

Ringling Bros. had management issues and various problems. People were revolted by the way other people were put on display. And concern about treatment of animals turned people off.

Competition came from circuses that focused on spectacular acrobatics – something that had also been a part of the Ringling shows – such as Cirque de Soleil and the Big Apple Circus.

The biggest circus in the world stopped touring in 2017. It is trying to make a comeback, sans animals.

One of the more shocking things you could have told my parents on the day I was born was that, 200 miles or so northeast of where they were holding their infant, there was a 25-year-old Boston University student for whom a national holiday will be celebrated.

Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t a Rev. or a Dr. in April 1954. He was a year away from obtaining his doctorate. He was married for less than a year to Coretta Scott. He wasn’t a father yet – of either his children or a civil rights movement; the Montgomery bus boycott was a year away.

(As an aside, I don’t think the idea of Black History Month, which we’re beginning, would have shocked my parents. There has been a commemoration of African-American history since the 1920s, known as Negro History Week. It was expanded in the early 1970s to all of February – the month in which Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass were born.)

No celebration of Black History Month can be made without considering the legacy of Dr. King. A Nobel Peace Prize winner and an agent of remarkable change in our nation, my parents – especially my Mom – admired Dr. King and were as crestfallen as most of the nation when he was assassinated in 1968.

My parents might have been shocked that someone less than two years older than my father would be the reason millions of Americans have the third Monday in January off. But once you told them about why, they would have understood.

At the time I was born, my parents had not flown on an airplane.

So when my father flew for the first time, from LaGuardia in New York to Cleveland Hopkins in 1962, one of the first questions we asked him was “What were the stewardesses like?”

It seems like a weird question in 2024. If only because nobody is called a “stewardess” anymore.

When airlines tried to build their business in the years after World War II, they believed the fastest way into the wallets of their potential customers – most of whom were male – was to appeal to their libidos.

That meant hiring young women who fit a stereotype of beautiful and dressing them in outfits generally not suited for the kind of work they were doing, Often, the women had to wear heels on long flights while handing out trays of food.

The advertising of the era would make most of the younger women I know cringe in horror. One airline, National, had a campaign that depicted stewardesses as the vessels on which they were flying. “I’m Cindy,” said one young woman. “Fly me to Miami, Tampa, Orlando, all over Florida.” Another, Southwest, briefly put its attendants in the hot pants that were the craze of the early ‘70s.

The women couldn’t be married. They couldn’t gain weight. Movies suggested the women had promiscuous private lives. When they were in their early 30s, they were done.

The raising of awareness in the late 60s put an end to this. Lawsuits successfully killed marriage, age and racial discrimination. And men took on the job in increasing numbers.

Now the term is flight attendant, which seems more appropriate, because it’s a tough job. Helping elderly and disabled passengers. Coping with crying babies of all ages.

There are still some vestiges of the old-style glamorous stewardesses on international carriers. But, fortunately, the sexualization of flight attendants seems to have gone the way of actually serving food on a flight.

My mother loved trivia. That might be obvious to anyone who knows how obsessed I am with it.

But in 1954, when I was born, trivia wasn’t a particularly big deal.

Yes, there were quiz shows – some of which were rigged to give the answers to contestants. But there weren’t a lot of outlets for trivia.

For one thing, there wasn’t as much of it. The amount of trivial content exploded with the advent of television, the proliferation of entertainment options and the expansion of professional sports.

Also booming was the population. The biggest generation in history had a shared past in common and seemed very interested in what about it they remembered.

Trivia as a source of game-playing and entertainment didn’t really take hold until the 1960s, when college students realized there were interesting – to trivialists – questions to be asked about old TV shows and baseball players.

One of the first manifestations of the trivia boom was “Jeopardy!,” which debuted in 1964. It was a daytime TV show that allowed trivia experts to show off their knowledge by making them come up with the questions for the answers given.

About 20 years later, Trivial Pursuit made trivia an obsession. The board game was once so popular that copies sold for $40 apiece and were really hard to come by.

In the 21st century, trivia is a social phenomenon. A few years back, my kids and I invaded a Rockland brewpub and wiped out the reigning champs. My mother heartily approved.

By the way, it’s Ouagadougou.

I know that my mother didn’t see a taco until 1965, when she and I each had one at the New Mexico pavilion of the New York World’s Fair.

So to tell her in 1954 that tacos would be among the most popular foods in America in 2024 might have drawn a blank expression and the question “What’s a taco?”

Of course, tacos were hardly new to the Southwest. In Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, Mexican immigrants had brought their food to the United States.

But in the 1950s, when New Yorkers thought about Hispanic immigrants, they thought about Puerto Rico. It’s a big point in “West Side Story.” And not a lot of Puerto Rican dishes spread beyond certain neighborhoods in the city.

So tacos and other Mexican-type food were slow to come east. Taco Bell, which is to Mexican food as Pizza Hut is to Italian food – that is, not really – didn’t open its first location east of the Mississippi until the late 1960s.

Tacos became popular for several reasons. One is that as more people come to the U.S. from Latin America, the food of the region – Mexican as well as from other nations – has become more popular. Tortillas and salsa take up considerable portions of a Safeway’s aisles.

Another is that they’re amazingly good. Even at Taco Bell.

Among the people who loved tacos was my mother. She made them for the first time in the late 1960s and loved them all the rest of her life.

“The Star-Spangled Banner” had been the national anthem of the United States for only 23 years on the day I was born.

Before 1931, there was no national anthem. “America the Beautiful” and “Hail, Columbia” were performed as anthems throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.

But Herbert Hoover, whose presidency was a general disaster, signed the legislation that made Francis Scott Key’s ode to the Battle of Fort McHenry the representative song of the nation.

The song is notoriously hard to sing (although, bragging here, my daughter knocked it out of the park in the fourth grade). And, around the time I was born, it was performed in a very straightforward way.

Usually, it was some sort of band or orchestra that performed it. Occasionally, there was a singer, a pop or opera star who sang the words as though they were afraid of messing it up.

Then came the fifth game of the 1968 World Series.

Recruited for performing the anthem that day was Jose Feliciano, a folk singer and guitarist. He sat on a stool and played the song in a different key, changing the inflections of the tune from the traditional melody.

.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQkY2UFBUb4

It was the Vietnam War era and baseball crowds – especially the ones who attended World Series games in Detroit – didn’t particularly care for Feliciano’s rendition. The blowback was tremendous – my father was among those annoyed about the performance. I, age 14, thought it was cool.

Feliciano single-handedly changed the way the anthem is performed. Famously soulful and emotional versions of the song came from Marvin Gaye, Whitney Houston and Aretha Franklin.

The anthem is played before every Met game I see at Citi Field. And in this day and age, singers seem to compete for the most stirring and hip way of performing it. If he, she or they strike a chord with the crowd, it’s a powerful minute-plus.

I think it would have surprised my parents to tell them that in 1954, as the anthem played on TV as a station’s broadcasting day ended.