A Look at Time Magazine's Person of the Year Covers
(Through a Boomer Lens)

Each January the editors of Time magazine select a "Person of the Year" for the cover of their first weekly issue of the year. They've been doing this for almost 79 years, and a look back at each decade offers a great retrospective on public thought during the time. The list of honorees includes both the famous and the infamous from Martin Luther King, Jr. and Albert Einstein to Adolf Hitler and Ayatollah Khomeini.

Persons of the year haven't always been men. Queen Elizabeth II in 1952 is often credited as the first woman to make the list, when actually in 1937 Mrs. Chaing Kai-shek was included with her husband. In fact, whole groups of people, such as the American Middle Class (1969) and American Women (1975) have graced the cover. Even a few non-humans have made it including the personal computer (1982) and our endangered earth (1988).

Philanthropist Boomers Grace This Year's Cover

This year, Time featured two Baby Boomers on the cover—singer Bono (born 1960), Bill Gates (born 1955) and Melinda Gates (born just below the Boomer wire in 1964)—for their philanthropic efforts. A look back at the Time covers of the 1950s, '60s and '70s reveals the high (and low) points of our collective history.

Our Years in Time

In the 1950s, Cold War movers and shakers including Nikita Khrushchev (1957) and Dwight Eisenhower (1959) were selected, but so was your "average Joe" including "G I Joe" (1950) and Hungarians who challenged Soviet rule (1956).

In the 1960s, boomers made the cover for the first time as "young people under 25" in 1966. The 1960s Time covers moved away from the traditional world political leader and honored those many admired including scientists (1960), astronauts (1968), Martin Luther King, Jr.(1963), and Pope John XXIII (1962).

NIxon made the cover twice in the 1970s (1971 and 1972) along with Judge Sirica (1973), the judge who went after the Watergate crew. The big players in the Middle East made the covers as well with King Faisal (1974), Jimmy Carter (1976) and Anwar Sadat (1977).

Individual Boomers started to make the covers in the 1990s including Ted Turner (1991), Bill Clinton (1992) and Jeff Bezos,(1999), head of Amazon.com.

Making an Impact for Five Decades and More

While Time magazine covers don't tell our whole story, a review of the past five decades shows Boomers continue to be right on the pulse of American society.

For much more on the Time covers, see the magazine's site.

—Betty Boom

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