Other generations nudged social norms; the baby boomers pushed, pulled and flipped the concepts of gender, race, family, religion and career. They gave us free love, power lunches, job sharing and disco. This year, the eldest of their ranks will take on a decade long synonymous with old age.

The baby boom, a post World War II population explosion, began 60 years ago today, on Jan. 1, 1946. By the time it ended in 1964, 75.8 million children had been born in the United States. By Dec. 31, about 2.8 million boomers will have turned 60, the leading edge of a demographic shift that will make America, and the world, statistically older than ever before.

It's likely society will, once more, refocus around them, but it's anybody's guess what that will mean for politics, health care, the work force or pop culture. Boomers rock out to the Stones and the Boss, preferably live. They pay college tuition for their children and nursing home bills for their parents. Pills and procedures promise health and longevity, but they seldom come cheap. Around them, pensions collapse, Social Security wobbles and the stock market shakes, but boomers dream anyway, with the idealism that's characterized their reign, of adventure-filled decades to come.

"I intend to fully embrace my sixtyness with enthusiasm and appreciation, not kicking and screaming," said Jill Brooks, one of many nearly-60s interviewed recently by the Monitor. "I'm not young any more. So what?"

Like Brooks, many boomers admit they're past youth and even the most generous boundaries of middle age, but they say they're not old and, if they have their way, never will be. At least not in the fashion that their parents and grandparents aged. They're entering, en masse, a new stage of existence, one created by the longest life expectancy in human history and one we have yet to name.

The harbingers of this shift are everywhere, from Concord's swanky new senior center to legislative worries about paying for Medicaid and public pensions. Planning boards routinely review proposals for 55-plus communities and often approve them because they bring tax revenue without adding children to cash-strapped schools.

Traditional icons of old age are adapting: Merrimack County's Meals on Wheels hosts luaus, and high-end walkers come equipped with Burberry plaid baskets. Golf courses are peopled with gray heads, but so too are rock-climbing classes, kayaking trips and ski slopes.

"We're not our grandparents -we're not even our parents," said Lorraine Carter, executive director of Concord's Centennial Senior Center, which, among other things, sponsors hikes, hosts foreign language classes and boasts computers that would put any college to shame. "We didn't have the baby boom just drop from the sky. We control every market that we're in.. . . In the future, you might see a Starbucks at a senior center."

Few boomers plan to retire completely. Most say they'll taper off instead, using the time to volunteer, travel or resurrect the activist tendencies they honed in the 1970s. Whatever they choose to call the coming decades, they will likely lack the financial safety nets of their parent's generation.

"Corporations left and right are dumping their obligations and promises," said Gary Smith, president of the State Employees Association, one of the largest unions in the state.

New Hampshire, Smith said, has yet to feel the brunt of retirement-related labor issues, but with state retirees clamoring for larger cost of living increases and with health care costs ballooning, he suspects things are about to get dicey.

"I think we're coming to a showdown," Smith said.

When reflecting on their lives thus far, many boomers interviewed invoke the memory of their parents, calling them "the greatest generation" and speaking humbly of their achievements. But they're no less proud of their own very different accomplishments.

"They (our parents) went through the Depression and World War II," said Wayne Beyer, a lawyer turning 60 next month who splits his time between North Conway and Washington, D.C. "We have been a generation of physical and economic comfort. People in our generation are in positions of great leadership."

President Bush and former president Clinton both turn 60 next year, and political experts suspect that boomers will drive the debate during the next several election cycles. Del Ali, the Monitor's Maryland-based pollster, says aging boomers could force politicians to undertake a full-scale overhaul of the health-care system.

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