Have you ever heard of a woman named Kathleen Casey-Kirschling?

No?

Me, neither, until this caught my eye, but now the poor woman has me conjuring images of Godzilla in Tokyo.

You see, poor Kathleen has the dubious honor of having been identified as America's "First Baby Boomer", and she is someone to be feared. (Bwaaaa haaa haaa!)

Having been born one second after midnight on the 1st of January in 1946, through some process not explained in the article ... but probably having something to do with sifting paperwork and statistical analysis, or not ... Kathleen Casey-Kirschling is now known as Numero Uno (Boom Noom Ooon?) in the generation of 80 million or so Americans born between 1946 and 1964 ... the Boomer Years.

Not that her birth brought ticker-tape parades or was plastered across headlines. Heck, on New Year's Day in 1946 no one had a clue that a baby boom had just begun.

At this end of the road, however, Kathleen has been tagged by Social Security Commissioner Michale Astrue as a woman "leading the way for her generation," the sandy shore of a vast sea, the first of the "silver tsunami" to apply for Social Security benefits, and that has a lot of people nervously wondering just how deep things are going to get.

Mixing metaphors in interesting ways, this first wave of the big wave is said to be "signaling an expected avalanche of applications". It's estimated that 10,000 people of our generations will become eligible for our SS money every single day over the next twenty years, and with the Social Security trust fund projected to go broke about 2041, that is mighty frightening to people who can count.

The Social Security Commissioner says he "optimistic that Congress will address the issue, perhaps after the 2008 presidential election," and with President Bush's budget director calling the SS / Medicade / Medicare hydra a "fiscal train wreck", we should have fingers and toes crossed that someone does something sometime.

Mrs. Casey-Kirschling, being the first and all, will probably see her benefits stretch until she no longer qualifies, but she has some faith, nonetheless, that the system will continue beyond her needs:

"I think the baby boomers will want to get this fixed," she said. "They're going to want to take care of their children and their grandchildren."

Well, yeah ...

And in the case of those of us who are counting at least partially on SS payments to subsidize purchases for both Pampers and Depends ... or some equivalent that is less dramatic, but makes more sense ... we'll be hoping our numbers on the 80-million-long list of Boomers doesn't fall too far down the tally to see our share come home.