| | Cover: The Boomer Files - Baby Boomers At 60 - MSNBC.com |
 | | Those first boomers were a year old when Howdy Doody first dangled on a TV screen the size of a dinner plate, 17 when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, 23 when they converged on Woodstock and 36 for the start of the great bull market of the 1980s. |
 | | "Baby boomers literally think they're going to die before they get old," says J. Walker Smith, president of Yankelovich Partners, the polling company, which found in one study that boomers defined "old age" as starting three years after the average American was dead. |
 | | People 60 years old today have an actuarial life expectancy of 82.3, but boomers don't consider themselves bound by the laws of statistics; they "fully expect that advances in health care and genomics are going to enable them to live past 100," says Smith. |
| www.msnbc.msn.com /id/9939304/site/newsweek (970 words) |