According to this http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/10/the-gent... it's from 1977

Edit: Interestingly, changing the year in the url still return the same page. So:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1977/10/the-gent...

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1954/10/the-gent...

Both point to the same article

In fact, much of the URL is meaningless:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/1666/09/great-fire...

I wish people would mention this when they submit. The text makes much more sense now!

Sorry -- I'd thought of including it in the link title, but I'd had the realization that this was an old article about midway through, and for some reason it increased my satisfaction in reading it. The clues are all there - the prices are what gave it away for me.

That explains why everything seemed so cheap. Adjusting for inflation, $2,000 in the early 70's is around $10,000 today.

$7,205.02

http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl