First Baby Boomer Hits New Milestone: 50

She was alienated from her parents, protested the Vietnam War, smoked pot, lived with her boyfriend--and voted for George Bush in the last presidential election.

So what else would you expect from a person whose birth signaled the arrival of the Baby Boom generation?

Nancy Edwards of Duarte doesn’t see anything unusual about the way she grew up. Or the way she is growing old.

But it turns out Edwards’ birth 50 years ago in Los Angeles marked the exact start of the Baby Boom, the youth-oriented crowd that for a quarter of a century defined tastes, trends and temperament in the United States.

She was born at the stroke of midnight as the year 1945 gave way to 1946. She would be followed by 76 million other postwar babies born from 1946 to 1964.

As the first Baby Boomers approach retirement age, there is renewed interest in the generation’s roots. Although at least one other person was born at almost the same moment, Edwards has beaten others in line for the designation as Baby Boomer No. 1, including a St. Louis aerospace worker born a split second later.

Now she hopes to beat the system: She wants to retire before the Social Security system runs out of money.

Last week Edwards joined the American Assn. of Retired Persons so she can qualify for its senior citizen discounts. “I don’t feel old,” she explains with a laugh. “Old used to be 30. Then it went to 40. Now I look at old as being 70.”

Still, Edwards isn’t surprised that no one can claim being a Baby Boomer longer than she. For years she has carried a laminated 50-year-old Times clipping showing her as a newborn.

As was the habit in those days, Edwards’ birth was the subject of a front-page story about the first baby of the new year. Four infants were born that New Year’s Day in different Los Angeles hospitals, it turned out. Edwards and a baby named Darleen Ayers arrived exactly at midnight; a boy and a girl were born 15 seconds later.

The newspaper story speculated whether the midnight births would be counted as Dec. 31 or Jan. 1. The issue was later settled when California Lutheran Hospital doctors marked Edwards’ birth date as 1-1-46 on the birth certificate filed with Los Angeles County officials.

The whereabouts of Ayers is unknown. But Edwards beat James Stickler Jr. of New Melle, Mo., by a split second. Stickler was found to have been born half a second after midnight in a recent review of 50-year-old wire service stories by the Associated Press.

All of that brings a smile to Edwards--a feisty and jovial type who has worked 11 years as an insurance collector at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena.

Edwards’ life is characteristic of Baby Boomers who tossed aside prewar lifestyles, said Richard Easterlin, a USC professor who has studied them for decades.

Her parents split up six weeks after she was born, and she spent her childhood at her maternal grandparents’ home in West Los Angeles. At 14 she moved back with her mother, spending several difficult years in Woodland Hills in Taft High School’s first graduating class.

Most of her friends lived on the Westside and hung out at a Venice coffeehouse where they shared poetry and pot. “I was a beatnik before I was a hippie,” Edwards said. “I protested the Vietnam War. When John Kennedy got shot I was comatose for a month.”

Edwards was a full-time clerical worker by the age of 18. She later worked for a time for the post office before settling on an accounting career. In 1978 she bought a $50,000 house in Duarte that is almost paid for.

She has never married, although she has had long-term live-in relationships with several men. “I was engaged twice. It’s a good thing I didn’t marry or I’d have been divorced twice,” she said.

She enjoys movies, wagering on horse races and rock music by the Beatles and Bob Dylan. She is an on-again, off-again Weight Watchers member. She sometimes is bothered by asthma and wonders if smoking marijuana caused it.

Edwards traces her political shift to the time she was victimized by a daylight assault on a Hollywood street corner.

Her decision to join AARP came the other day when she saw a Modern Maturity magazine left in a Huntington Memorial Hospital waiting room. “Boomers! The Babies Face 50,” its cover said.

“I said, ‘Oh, that story’s about me!’ The sign-up card was inside, so I sent it in,” she said.

“A person’s got to think about the future.”