‘Some are born great … some have greatness thrust upon them’

By Brendan Buhler

Saturday, April 26, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Kathleen Casey-Kirschling has a press agent because she was born. Or, more accurately, because of the importance of her birth moment.

It was less than a second into 1946.

Casey-Kirschling, her press agent will tell you, is the nation’s first Baby Boomer.

Does this mean if we drive a stake through her heart, she’ll hiss away into a pile of dust, the spell will break, Social Security will be saved and we’ll no longer be forced to argue about the meaning of the ’60s?

No, probably not.

Also not nice, and Casey-Kirschling is very nice, even if she says things like, “I really think that everything right now is about the Baby Boomers.”

Well, she also says nice things about boating, which is why we ran into her at Lake Mead. More on that later.

Let’s get back to how she claimed the mantle of the Ur-Boomer: She was the firstborn child on the date later deemed the birth of the post-World War II Baby Boom generation. It works for the U.S. Census Bureau and it works for the Social Security Administration, which has put Casey-Kirschling in a public service announcement urging Baby Boomers to sign up to collect their checks. (She’s confident Social Security will be fixed.)

Picking an exact date for the birth of a generation is not as easy as it sounds. It’s like asking when life begins or milk starts to taste funny. It’s fuzzy around the edges.

For instance, the theory behind the Baby Boom generation is that everyone went off to fight in World War II, came back and made a lot of babies. In 1945 the war ends; in 1946 the kids are born. Now, not to put too fine a point on it, anyone born on Jan. 1, 1946, was conceived before the end of the war. Again, fuzzy.

But that’s when Kathleen Casey (no Kirschling, yet) came bawling into existence in a Philadelphia hospital near the Pennsauken, N.J., home of a Navy machinist and his homemaking wife.

“At the time,” Casey-Kirschling says, “we didn’t know I was the first Boomer.”

No one noticed there’d been a Baby Boom until the 1950s.

Instead, she was sent off to Catholic school like a normal kid.

Later, she danced on “American Bandstand,” married a doctor, had children, got divorced, went back to school, sold NutriSystem diets, married a professor, taught nutrition to seventh graders and retired. Took up boating.

Her first-Boomer fame started in 1980, when “Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation” was published. Author Landon Y. Jones, a midlevel editor at People magazine who had taken six months off to write the book, found Casey-Kirschling’s birth reported in an old Philadelphia newspaper. Less than a second after midnight in the Eastern time zone? Ta-da: America’s first Boomer. He started the book with her, without even talking to her.

Some messages for Casey-Kirschling trickled in. He looked her up and sent them to her.

Then, in 1985, when Jones was editing Money magazine and Casey-Kirschling’s and her generation’s 40th birthdays loomed, he decided to profile her for the magazine. When she approached her 50th birthday, and he was back at People magazine, he reprised her. For her 60th, he wrote her up for Smithsonian magazine, examining her as an anthropological treasure.

“I’ve sort of made half of a career out of watching her,” Jones says.

By Casey-Kirschling’s 60th birthday, of course, others had caught on to her celebrity. Six months ago, when, acting as the government’s official first Boomer, she signed up for Social Security, everyone caught on. More stories. TV appearances. Endorsement contract offers. Of the endorsements, so far she’s doing one only for boating. She already liked boating.

“I don’t know why it happened to me, just because I happened to be accidentally born on one day,” Casey-Kirschling says. “You just have to Google my name. Actually, I’m on YouTube.”

Now here it is, a sunny spring Thursday six months later, and Casey-Kirschling is in a borrowed luxury motor boat from a MarineMax dealer, floating on Lake Mead as a paid spokeswoman for Discover Boating. It’s an industry trade group that has sent a press agent along to help Casey-Kirschling encourage Americans to take up boating, rising fuel prices aside. It’s a nice, healthy outdoor activity, Casey-Kirschling says, for 78.2 million Baby Boomers heading for retirement.

“There’s such a misconception that boating is only for the affluent,” Casey-Kirschling says. She recommends boaters save on fuel — which is about $4 a gallon right now, with your average cruiser getting about 1.5 miles per gallon — by going more slowly or going Dutch with other boaters.

She manages to mention boating a lot. For instance, her boat is named “First Boomer.” She’s busy scouting the country for a place to retire and play with her grandchildren and, “in between, boating and staying healthy.”

And the fame?

“I take it one day at a time, but it certainly has been a busy year,” Casey-Kirschling says. “One thing that’s nice is it’s going to be a story for my grandchildren after I’m gone.”

And won’t that be something: the death of the first Baby Boomer.