Clearly, Late Boomers are a complex species. I called another person with a December 31, 1964, birthday — Shannon Borg, a poet, author and wine writer living in the San Juan Islands, north of Seattle. "I grew up as the youngest boomer," she writes, "in a house full of them." (Being a writer, she prefers to answer via email.) According to Shannon, boomers "took much of the promise of post-WWII Earth and frittered it away around the world." But she also credits them for making "a totally new paradigm for what it is to be an American."

Baby boom — good or evil? Shannon won't play that game; she resists my efforts to pin down her generational allegiances: "What polarizes us is the labeling and categorizing into increasingly small boxes. Us against them. Right versus left. This generation versus that. It makes good journalism, but bad politics."

My next call was to a man in the Midwest, born at 11:29 p.m. on that December 31. I'll call him Max. He didn't want his name used, and can't fathom why I'm doing a story on the Last Boomers. "I don't think it has much meaning." I press him. "People my age don't think about it much." Didn't the baby boom have any impact? He allows that he remembers a little of the "feeling of the '60s." Which was? "Anything goes." Max went into the military.

In the late 1960s, there was indeed a short period of anything goes. Then everything went. Now it's the Republicans who remember Woodstock. And yet, the world is inarguably a very different place from what it was when the Greatest Generation ran it, and the Last Boomers are part of that transformation — even if they prefer not to admit it.

Finally, I reached out to a man who has a strong claim to being the very last Last Boomer. He was born minutes before midnight in America's westernmost time zone. But all attempts to contact him — by phone, email and social media — were met with gnomic silence.

So I stalked him on Facebook. I'll call him Ace, after Ace Frehley, ex-guitarist in Kiss. This Ace is a heavy metal drummer, and Kiss is his favorite band. I found an album recorded by our Ace's band in the late 1990s. It was weightily heavy and metallically metal. But Ace's Facebook presence is modest — tributes to other bands, snapshots from his relationship with an attractive woman, pictures of cats.

A lover of loud music leading a quiet and kitty-filled life, a performer in an exhibitionist genre who skips an opportunity to exhibit himself — perhaps Ace, whoever he is, embodies the contradictions of the Last Boomers. They're like the quiet youngest child in a big family of loudmouth older siblings. They grew up in the baby boom universe and take it for granted. They may not know that there was ever another cosmos.