USA TODAY and CBS News are exploring the aging of an iconic generation and the impact on the nation.
This series also will be on boomers.usatoday.com and cbsnews.com. For more coverage, watch CBS' The Early Show, 7-9 a.m. ET
Steve Morley can rattle off the cultural milestones of the Baby Boom generation with ease. Identifying with them, however, proves more elusive.
John F. Kennedy's assassination?
"I was 4, although it is one of the earliest memories that I have."
The Summer of Love, in 1967? "I was 8."
The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert Kennedy? "Turned 9 that summer."
Woodstock, in 1969? "Barely aware when it happened."
The Vietnam War? "Saigon fell before I got my driver's license."
Morley is a late Boomer, born in 1959 — 13 years after the postwar birth explosion began and five years before it officially waned.
"We were at the tail end of everything," says Morley, a software engineer who lives in McKinney, Texas. Merchandisers and TV shows aimed for an older audience when he was growing up, he recalls, "marketing to people who were 10 years older than me. When the show thirtysomething came on (in 1987), that was aimed at older people. ... Honestly, I've never felt like a Baby Boomer."
Call it a generation gap within the same generation.
The Baby Boom stretched over 19 calendar years, from 1946 through 1964 — enough time for the first and last Boomers to have lived through drastically different experiences.
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"Someone coming of age in 1950 lives through JFK, the soaring rhetoric of Martin Luther King, the Mickey Mouse Club and Leave It to Beaver," says Steven Gillon, resident historian of the History Channel and author of Boomer Nation. "After 1960, their memories are Watergate and oil embargo."
Yet, they have been lumped into one demographic behemoth (77 million) that has guided marketing decisions, transformed history and politics and reshaped entertainment sensibilities for more than six decades.
As the nation marks the 65th birthday of the first Boomers beginning next month, the millions born at the tail end of the generation are feeling a disconnect.
"I don't see myself as the typical Boomer," says Anthony Ferdaise, born in 1962. His older sister is 64, at the front end of his generation and worlds apart in experiences.
Ferdaise, a nurse who lives in Phoenix, makes his point in musical terms: "She saw The Doors in concert. I saw The Clash."
Bridging the old and the new
The beginning and end of a generation are marked by a rise and fall in the number of births.
"It's entirely subjective, but most people agree on the beginning (1946) and ending dates (1964) of the Baby Boom generation, and if you look at it demographically, that makes sense," says demographer Cheryl Russell, editorial director at New Strategist Publications, a publisher of reference books.
In 1945, there were fewer than 3 million births in the USA. The figure hit 3.4 million in 1946, topped 4 million in 1954 and peaked at 4.3 million in 1957. The number of annual births stayed above 4 million through 1964 before slipping to 3.8 million in 1965. That put the end of the Baby Boom at the close of 1964.
About 37 million people now in the USA were born in the first half of the Baby Boom, and about 40 million in the second.
The generation is significant not only because of its numbers but because it built a bridge to a dramatically different America, says William Frey, demographer at the Brookings Institution.
'The Boomers are the transition between old and new," he says.
That transition also occurred within the generation.
Michele Kimbrough of Chicago was born during the last year of the boom, in 1964. Her parents are Baby Boomers.
"I don't really relate myself to the Boomer generation," says Kimbrough, a former non-profit executive working on a doctorate in natural medicine.
"I am a Venti, half-caff Boomer," she jokes, using popular coffee house terms. "I can call myself a flower child and still navigate successfully through this new culture of hip-hop madness."
Census numbers show the changes in America's profile from one end of the Boomer generation to the other:
•Race and ethnicity. Seventy-six percent of early Boomers are non-Hispanic whites, compared with 68% of those born later. Blacks are the largest minority among older Boomers but are outnumbered by Hispanics among younger Boomers. Blacks make up 12% of Boomers born in the 1960s; Hispanics are 13%.
•Education. The share of women with a high school diploma or less education dropped from 43% among older Boomers to 38% among the younger ones. The opposite is true among men, a potential fallout of rising immigration: 38% of older male Boomers had no postsecondary education, compared with 44% of those born later.
•Marriage. More late Boomers have not married. Ten percent of older male Boomers and 8% of older female Boomers have not married — but among younger Boomers, 16% of men and 12% of women haven't been to the altar.
•Military service. About 71% of early male Boomers never served in the military compared with 87% of late Boomers. The military draft ended in 1973, long before late Boomers reached 18.
The numbers fluctuate every year, as Boomers die and Boomer-age immigrants move here.
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Younger Boomers are more likely to be immigrants — 17% vs. 13% of older Boomers — and nearly half of the young immigrant Boomers arrived here after 1990. Only 15% of older Boomers speak a language other than English at home, compared with 22% of the younger ones.
Gillon says the Boomer generation is so deeply rooted in the American experience, from TV shows and advertising to politics and race relations, that immigrants who did not grow up here can't be viewed as true Boomers.
"Being a Boomer is being part of a unique and historical experience ... a shared generation experience of people who grew up in America," he says. "You have to remember Captain Kangaroo."
The difference between older and younger Boomers is heavily influenced by the Vietnam War.
"If you were born by 1950, you had to confront Vietnam in some way," Gillon says. "It was like a giant mountain that stood in their pathway."
He calls the younger end of the generation "shadow Boomers," a group that straddles two generations (Boomers and Generation X), and relates to both yet feels as if it belongs in neither.
"From my perspective, I've been following the parade," says Greg McMorrow, born in 1961.
He and eight siblings were born during the Baby Boom.
"My oldest sister was born in '47, and one younger brother was born in '63," says McMorrow, a small-business owner in San Jose. "The '60s and protest stuff was something that my older brother and sister were a part of."
His brother talked about the Summer of Love — the event that defined the hippie counterculture movement when as many as 100,000 people gathered in San Francisco — and attending small concerts where The Doors andJanis Joplin performed.
Another brother, who had conscientious-objector status during the Vietnam War and was exempted from military service, spoke at an anti-war event.
"The people who are born post-'59, they don't have the same sense of being the children of that generation," McMorrow says. "I've been an observer. Never felt a part of it."
Frey says later Boomers "got the short end of the stick."
The first in their generation were rebellious and grew up in a prosperous time.
Younger ones "entered the workforce when things were pretty bad," he says, in an era marked by gas shortages and President Nixon's resignation.
"For some, when they first got their driver's license they were sitting in gas lines," says Robert Lang, sociologist at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.
"It wasn't like 'fun fun fun till her daddy takes her T-bird away,' " he says, referring to The Beach Boys' 1964 hitFun, Fun, Fun.
Contrasting experiences
Wendy Thomson turned 60 last month. The impact of her generation was clear to her early on because of its sheer size.
"They just did not know what to do with all of us," says Thomson, a retired management consultant who grew up in Birmingham, Mich. "I remember having classes in the cafeteria and gym. ... They were building schools like mad. When I went away to college, I had a tiny (dormitory) room that was meant for two in the '20s and there were three of us. I was always just squished."
But she has been able to send her sons to college and to retire early, something that will be a struggle for her sister-in-law, who was born in 1962.
"Her whole experience was just so different from mine," Thomson says. "She is far away from retirement and she is now stuck. The market crashed, housing values crashed."
Older Boomers redefined American culture in what Gillon calls "a cultural earthquake."
"They created a world significantly different than the one their parents created," he says, making the differences between young and old Boomers seem minor by comparison. Adds Gillon, himself a Boomer born in 1956, "We have inherited a world that Boomers have made."
Born 1950
"They just did not know what to do with all of us."
Born 1959
"We were at the tail end of everything."
Despite those no longer with us like JFK or Richard Nixon, or Ronald Reagan, most do not realize that persons like McConnell and Henry Kissinger were in government when baby boomers graduated high school. They have lived under the direction of these people for 50 years, as the boomers are now closing in on 70 years old. This is not stability with progress; Oligopoly has been with us for 50 years or more, essentially until Clinton came along!
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