Does It Count as History if I Can Still Remember?

Exercising our usual 20-60 hindsight, astronomers generally agree that the "long 1920s" (1918–1929) were a Golden Age for finding our place in the Cosmos, not at the center, not in a unique galaxy, and not static, with credits to Shapley, Hubble, V. M. Slipher, Leavitt, and Humason. This is now history for all of us. But there was a second Golden Decade (1963–73) that added many new kinds of entities to the Universe with the discovery of quasars, the cosmic microwave background, pulsars, X-ray binaries including both NS and BH, and with the propounding of plausible mechanisms for them all. These I do remember as current events and have had the privilege of meeting most of the Prime Movers: Schmidt and Hazard; Gamow, Dicke, Penzias, and Wilson; Bell and Hewish; Giacconi; Salpeter, Gold, and Woltjer; Rees and Hawking; Fowler, Hoyle, and the Burbidges; and more. I even wrote the last fundamentally wrong paper about Cygnus X-1 and a wrong letter to Nature about pulsars (not quite the last). And I was there when John Mather showed the COBE CMB spectrum and Geoff Burbidge asked what we were applauding for — The Universe? The presentation will consist of short rounds of appreciation for the Universe and for the privilege of being allowed to investigate it in both in real time and as history.