Prime Time: How Baby Boomers Will Revolutionize Retirement and Transform America

Probably at no period and in no culture have the old been so completely rejected as in our own country, during the last generation.

Lewis Mumford, 1956

Wake up and live in Sun City
For an active new way of life.
Wake up and live in Sun City
Mr. Senior Citizen and wife.
Don't let retirement get you down!
Be happy in Sun City; it's a paradise-town.

Radio advertising jingle, Del Webb Corporation, 1960

For five months Tom Breen had been holding his boss at bay. Every time he got a nervous call from Del Webb asking "Do you know what you're doing out there?" Breen would respond calmly that all was under control. Now, on New Year's Eve 1959, hours before the opening of what would become Sun City, Breen was experiencing jitters. So along with Owen Childress, John Meeker, and Jack Ford -- the other members of the Del Webb Company team developing the new community restricted to adults over age fifty -- Breen headed down to Manuel's Place in the neighboring town of Peoria, Arizona, to talk over, one more time, their prospects for the New Year's Day 1960 opening.

"Everybody was quiet," Breen recalls, "We were all wondering the same thing. 'Will anybody come tomorrow?'" Then Owen Childress broke the ice, "I'm worried," he admitted to the others, "how I'm going to get a thirty-year

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