The Baby Boomer Generation
The Baby Boomer Generation
What You (Maybe) Didn’t Know About the Baby Boomer Generation
“Baby Boomers” refers to the generation of people born immediately after World War II, between 1946 and 1964. That means as of 2022, how old is the youngest boomer, the youngest Baby Boomers will be 58 and the oldest will be turning 76 years old.
At Boom Again—the new pop culture trivia game from the makers of such game classics as Taboo and Outburst—we know a thing or two about the Baby Boomer generation. (Actually 2,240 specific things that became questions in the game.)
Here, we share a few facts about the Boom.
Some famous Baby Boomers…
With a generation that spans nearly two decades, there are of course literally millions of Baby Boomers. Here are some of the more famous faces born during the Boom…
At the older end of the Boom are such notable celebrities as Diane Keaton, Steven Spielberg, Candice Bergen, Sylvester Stallone, Cher, Liza Minnelli, Danny Glover,
The youngest celebrity Boomers include Keanu Reeves, Wanda Sykes, Don Cheadle, Nicolas Cage, Courtney Cox, Rob Lowe, Courtney Love, Vivica A. Fox, and supermodel Elle Macpherson.
American presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump are all also baby boomers.
The Baby Boomer generation is sandwiched between “Silent” and “X.”
The parents of Baby Boomers come from the Silent Generation (1928-1945) and, before that, the Greatest Generation.
Much is said about the generational gap between Baby Boomers and Millennials—but tucked in between them is the often-forgotten Gen X (born 1965-1980), which brought us such famed celebrities as Pamela Anderson, Julia Roberts, Will Smith, Jennifer Aniston, and Celine Dion.
Why is it called the “Baby Boom?”
As soon as WWII ended and G.I.s started coming home low and behold there was a sharp rise in the birth rate (with 1946 setting the record for the highest number of births in a calendar year in U.S. history). About 3.4 million births were recorded that year.
The U.S. baby-boom population was about 72.5 million in 1964. Boomers were the largest generation until millennials came along.
So why so many births?
The Baby Boomer generation came about due to a perfect storm of world events, including:
- Soldiers returning from the war were eager to start families after holding off on marriage during the war.
- The economy was also booming after both the war and the Great Depression, so people felt in a better financial position to afford a bigger family.
- Pop culture—everything from movies to TV and even board games (like The Game of Life) glorified marriage, pregnancy, and parenthood.
- Congress passed the G.I. Bill of Rights, giving millions of veterans a chance at homeownership at very low interest rates on loans (and you had to fill all those bedrooms with somebody!).
- Add to that, medical advances made childbirth safer, and a unique generation was born (and born and born). Late in the Boom “the pill” resulted in the choice to delay having a family – but before then it was an inevitability.
Like any generation, the Baby Boomer generation was shaped by the events around them.
Boomers witnessed an enormous rise in technology.
At the start of the Baby Boom, getting a black and white TV in your home was a huge event—and not every home had one. By the end of the Boom, video games and personal computers were making an appearance (and would enormously influence the next generation).
They saw that big step for mankind.
American astronauts were the first to land on the moon, and “outer space” was a big element of Boomers’ lives—from watching, riveted, as John Glenn orbited, to dressing up as astronauts for Halloween, to buying space-travel themed foods like Tang and space food sticks, and eventually watching live as Neal Armstrong took those first steps on the moon. (Thank you, JFK)
Baby boomers experienced the start of the modern-day civil rights movement.
In 1955 Rosa Parks famously wouldn’t give up her seat on the bus to a white man and inspired the Montgomery Bus Boycott (led by a young Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.) – an event that drew the nation’s attention to the problem of segregation and racial inequality.
The Baby Boomer generation received a lot of inspiration from other civil rights activists as well, such as Malcolm X, John Lewis, and Muhammad Ali, among others.
And pop culture helped shape Baby Boomers more than any generation before.
Never before had TV, movies and media been so prevalent in peoples’ lives. There were so many Boomers they shaped media and trends and everything else they came into contact with. everything from miniskirts to rock & roll to the sexual revolution. In this post we did answer when was the boomer generation and when did the boomer generation start. If you are part of the younger generation, enjoy the boomers when you can, they will not be around forever.
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