One morning in 1962, commuters crossing San Francisco's Bay Bridge were greeted by a billboard emblazoned with the number 17,341,416, the projected population of New York State on January 1, 1963. Alongside this number was a running elec- tronic tally of the estimated increase in California's population, then growing at a rate of one person every 54 seconds.
By New Year's Day, 1963, California had surged ahead to become, by official estimate, the most populous state in the
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