Boomer Tsunami

[The essential point of this post has been in my mind for decades, namely that there has been a tidal wave of population of people my age for every year of my life!]

The Post War Baby Boom produced an unprecidented surge of new babies in the United States – start a bit in 1947, but really hitting it’s stride in my year, 1948.

That surge of extra new people has swamped the system every year of my life, because my year is the year that it really hits … every year!

The services for my age group have been under strain every year of my life! From grade schools for 6 year olds, to elder care for 80 year olds!

I believe that my birth year, 1948, was the leading edge of it all!

Here are thumbnails for each Boomer era:

Main points in overview:

• Unprecedented surge of new babies
• 60’s – 70’s, all those babies hit high school.
• Fast-forward to now, all those babies are clogging up the retireree infrastructure.
• The boomers don’t go to the mall any more –> malls are going out of business.
  • Some are starting being turned into old folks homes!!
• is the boomer wave somehow related to the country falling apart, I think it is.
  • White supremacy?
• Every generation feels their oat in their 20’s.
  • It’s probably no accident that the economic BOOM happened at the same time the boomer wave hit the workforce.

It’s just the birds and the bees

In the late 1930 and early 1940’s, the world(!) was locked in a titanic struggle.

Japan invited the United States into the struggle in 1941 by bombing Pearl Harbor!

After that, pretty much every able-bodied single, young-ish man (and many women) in the whole, wide country was enlisted into the service in whatever way they could best serve.

It all ended on VE Day (8 May 1945) on the Atlantic front, and VJ Day (15 August 1945) on the Pacific front.

Suddenly all those young men (and women) were coming home, eager to restart the lives they had been ripped out of the war. For quite a few that meant starting a family.

My dad was a little older (in his 30’s), already raising a family (2 kids), but he was an MD, so the Army wanted him anyway.

As it happened, my lot in life was to be born pretty much on the leading edge of what came to be called the Post War Baby Bo

Boomer Timeline

The internet says that baby boomers babies are those who were born after World War 2 all the way into the mid-60’s – 1946 to 1964.

• 1946–1954 — the Boomer vanguard! (ME!)
• 1955–1964 — Boomer mop-up

As long as we’re here, here are the 15 year blocks that Google has broken the rest of our lives into.

• 1946-1964 Baby Boomers
• 1965-1980 Gen X
• 1980-1996 Millennials
• 1997-2012 Gen Z
• 2013-2024 Gen Alpha
• 2025- … Gen Beta

Alpha and Beta are just placeholders, a prudent decision since the zeitgeist will tell us the real name when they have been arrived at! :))

I started noticing it in 7th grade!

I was an early boomer, the real boomers!

The mental image here is of a rogue wave … a REALLY BIG wave that way bigger than your current systems is set up to handle.

Heading into the 1940’s and during the war, the domestic infrastructure was set up to handle a particular volume of new people.

All those horny young men and women produce a tidal wave of new babies.

So my point is probably kind of obvious by now:

• The high school I attended in Louisville KY had it’s first graduating class the year I started 7th grade there.
  • I paid no attention at the time, but by the time I was a senior, we all knew very well that we were the sixth actual graduating class for Sally Phillips Durrett High School.
• It’s last graduatioing class was six years after mine,

Somewhere in the mid 70’s the baby boom had receded enough that they cashiered my school as a school and turned it onto County Board if Education ioffices. Good for them!

So if you went to some city school with traditions that goback to the turn of the previous century, well, good for you. I did not have that. 🙂

The next year, the kids one year behind me, got sent to a brand new school off in the other direction, Thomas Jefferson High School.

In My World, my year was the first Boomer class

My personal, anecdotal experience is that things were the old way the year before me, but thing were a whole new way my year and thereafter.

• years before — beer and more beer
• my year — beer and pot
• coupla years later — ber and pot and lsd or quaaalude if you could find them

Young adults – the very people that a government hoovers up at the start of a war to fight it – had put their lives on hold for 4, 5, 6 years or more to be part of the war effort. Now the war was over so they could come home and take up their interrupted lives, which certainly included making babies!

In other words, the divide happened between high school classes 1965 and 1966, or college classes 1969 and 1970. Your mileage may vary, but I’m sticking to that!

The class of ’65 wouldn’t think of smoking pot or protesting the war … their world was drinking beer, chasing girls and working on their cars like they were trapped in American Graffiti!

The year(s) aafter me were like me. Vietnam protests and

My age group has been a slow-moving civic crisis my whole life!

Every age I’ve been my whole life has caused some kind of civic crisis because they are just so damn many of us boomers.

I was in the fourth graduating class at my new high school and 20 years later. The building was back to be county offices because the boomer wave was over.

• schools
• old folks homes, wheelchairs, that sort of thing
• just now, next gen of writers

July 2026 Addendum

Political TV and political media in general have been aflame with questions about Mitch McConnell. We haven’t seen anything that amounts to “proof of life” for something like five weeks!

Then this morning comes the news that Lindsey Graham died “unexpectedly” last night.

Then of course there was the endless nattering about Joe Biden at the end of his term. Our government is pretty much a gerontracy!

Wiki 7/20/26 Full article, great charts further down

Baby Boomers (born 1946–1964) make up about 20% of the U.S. population with roughly 67 million surviving members. They are the second-largest living adult generation after Millennials. Known for controlling over half of the nation’s total wealth, they are also highly diverse and technologically engaged. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

Demographics & Diversity

• Total Births: 76 million Americans were born during the post-WWII boom.
• Racial Diversity: The Boomer generation is approximately 71% non-Hispanic White, 11% Black, 11% Latino or Hispanic, and 6% Asian American.
• Age & Life Expectancy: Boomers are currently aged 62 to 80. The oldest members officially turned 80. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Economics & Retirement

• Wealth: Boomers hold more than half of the total wealth in the United States. [1]
• Retirement Strain: Despite high overall wealth, 40% of older Americans rely solely on Social Security for retirement income, and a quarter have no personal savings. [1, 2]
• Workforce: Driven by both financial need and choice, a significant portion of Boomers expect to continue working past traditional retirement age, with approximately 40% expecting to “work forever”. [1, 2]

Technology & Lifestyle

• Connectivity: Contrary to popular stereotypes, 93% of Boomers own smartphones and 75% regularly use mobile apps.
• Caregiving: About one-quarter of Boomers identify as caregivers for either aging parents or grandchildren