In 1967, the United States was mired in Vietnam, dozens died in race riots in Detroit, Thurgood Marshall became the first African-American Supreme Court justice and an Atlanta woman named Sally Woo had a very special baby at Crawford W. Long Memorial Hospital.

Woo had no idea just how special her baby was until Life magazine told her Robert "Bobby" Ken Woo Jr., born at 11:03 a.m. on Nov. 20, was the 200,000,000th American.

CHARLOTTE B. TEAGLE/Staff (ENLARGE)

Bobby Woo, the 200 millionth person born in the United States 38 years ago, is shown with his family: wife Angie; children Erin, 6 (left); Megan, 3, (right); and 16-month-old-Caeley.

CHARLOTTE B. TEAGLE/Staff (ENLARGE)

Bobby Woo holds a copy of LIFE magazine, in which he appeared when he was born. He's the one on the full page on the right.

(ENLARGE)

Cover of LIFE magazine.

Census and demographics Metro Atlanta 2nd in growth nationwide Three area counties lead nation in growth Glitches jeopardize smooth 2010 census A profile of Robert Woo, the 200,000,000th American Recent headlines: Georgia State gets grant to study school bullying  Delta flight to Atlanta diverted to Chattanooga  State Masonic group withdraws charges     • Metro and state news

A reporter and photographer at Crawford Long were one of 23 teams Life had stationed at hospitals around the country to locate the baby that would be born just as the U.S. Census Bureau's population clock hit 200 million.

Later this year, sometime in October, the Census Bureau expects the nation's population to reach 300 million living Americans. Late Thursday night, the bureau's online population stood at 298,124,686.

A baby is born in the United States every eight seconds, someone dies every 12 seconds and an immigrant arrives every 28 seconds, according to the clock. That means the United States gains a person every 13 seconds.

The Census Bureau won't speculate where the 300,000,000th American might be born. But demographers say a Hispanic baby or an immigrant would be most representative of how the country has changed since the 1970 census. Hispanics have the highest growth rate of any group in the United States and account for nearly half the annual increase in U.S. population, experts say.

Whites 'disappearing'

By the time the population reaches 400 million in approximately 2050, the white non-Hispanic population will be 50.1 percent, said Carl Haub, a senior demographer with the Population Reference Bureau in Washington. "The so-called majority population is kind of disappearing," he said.

During Bobby Woo's life, Atlanta and the nation have continued to follow patterns predicted by Richard Scammon, a former director of the U.S. Census Bureau who wrote the 1967 article on the 200,000,000th American for Life magazine. That issue featured baby pictures of Woo and other infants who vied for the title.

Scammon correctly predicted the nation would continue to bulldoze farmland and forests and create suburbs. He predicted that a higher percentage of people would attend college; that house sizes would increase; and that air conditioning would become the norm. But his prediction that we would all be working a 30-hour, four-day workweek fell a little short.

The nation has become more ethnically diverse over the last three decades, with minorities making up 33 percent of the population in 2004, compared with 16 percent in 1970, according to Haub.

When Bobby Woo was growing up in Tucker, there were only a handful of Asian-Americans in the school system. Atlanta had few immigrants then. Even Buford Highway, now a thriving immigrant thoroughfare, was then a mostly Caucasian, blue-collar community, and a gallon of gas cost 16 cents.

Notoriety inspired success

Now Woo, 38, who became the first Asian and Pacific-American partner at the King & Spalding law firm, has children of his own. The honor and notoriety of being the 200,000,000th American inspired him to succeed, he said.

In fact, his life as a fourth-generation Chinese-American embodies the multigenerational American success story. And his experience as a Southerner epitomizes the idea of today's America as a tossed salad of distinct cultures and traditions.

Woo speaks with a soft drawl and has the manners of a Southern gentleman. He grew up eating collard greens, black-eyed peas and hog jowls on New Year's Day, thinking it was traditional Chinese fare. Sally Woo remembers Bobby's surprise when she took him to the supermarket to buy collards and they were sold out.

"He said, 'I didn't know there were so many Chinese in Atlanta!' " his mom recalled with a chuckle.

"The way we raised our children, it was all mixed," she said. "Part Southern and part Chinese. I guess they got a little bit confused."

Reg Murphy, who went on to become the Atlanta Constitution editor, was one of the Life magazine reporters who covered the great baby chase and interviewed the Woos the day their son was born. He continued to follow the story for the Constitution and visited little Woo on his first five birthdays to write about his progress.

Woo was a typical American suburban kid who rode his bike and played baseball, football and soccer. His family's progress in many ways mirrors the progress of Chinese immigrants in Augusta and the Mississippi Delta, Bobby Woo said.

Woo's father, Robert Ken Woo Sr., grew up in Augusta, home to a generations-old Chinese-American community founded by laborers who widened the Augusta Canal after the Civil War.

Woo's mother left Hong Kong for the United States eight years before his birth. Chinese immigrants in Georgia and the Mississippi Delta started out by owning grocery stores in minority communities from the 1930s through the 1950s, Sally Woo said. The next generation became pharmacists and engineers in the 1960s and 1970s.

Robert Woo's father told him not to study law, saying, "You can't get a job as a minority."

Instead, he studied engineering and later became a certified public accountant. Sally Woo earned a chemical engineering degree at Georgia Tech. Bobby Woo went to Harvard University and then Harvard Law School, where he met classmate and future wife Angie, 35. The couple gave their three daughters names with a Celtic ring: Erin, 6; Megan, 3; and Caeley, 16 months.

Angie Woo's maiden name was Mooney, an Irish name for a long-ago forebear. That's a departure from Woo's parents, who named their children in alphabetical order: Angie, Bobby, Cindy and David.

Honor almost never came

Woo almost missed being born American at all. Sally Woo fled the Communist Revolution in 1949 and lived in Hong Kong from age 5 to 15 while her father went abroad searching for a better life for the family. He was a teacher in China but worked in a restaurant in Brazil for six years.

"We were planning to go to Brazil. He learned to speak Portuguese and everything," Sally Woo said of her father, Way Lam.

In 1959, after 10 years of waiting for permission to come to the United States, and with the help of attorney Carl Sanders, who a few years later became governor of Georgia, her father and his family were allowed to join his father and three brothers in Augusta. A few years later, the immigration bill of 1965 dramatically altered the flow of people into the United States, allowing more immigrants from Asia and Latin America.

Bobby Woo has been very involved in Georgia immigration reform. From 1996 to 2001, he led a coalition of nonprofit organizations lobbying the Legislature to treat legal immigrants the same as U.S. citizens. One proposal Woo lobbied against would have limited legal immigrants to a one-year lifetime cap on welfare benefits vs. a four-year lifetime cap for U.S. citizens, Woo said. The Legislature decided to make the benefits equal for citizens and legal immigrants in 2001.

"It really put Georgia up there with other states as a good model for the fair treatment of immigrants," Woo said.

Woo shies away from making any predictions about what to expect when the country reaches 400 million.

He says his fondest hope is that the future brings good things for his children. "I hope they are happy in whatever they do," he said.