Two other members of their group house scrambled eggs and poured coffee in the kitchen. A third packed her car for the ride home later; a fourth had gone for a run; and a fifth was upstairs, apparently still asleep.

In all, 24 men and women share this six-bedroom, 31/2-bath home on the beach block in Ventnor. They split bedrooms and share baths, sometimes cooking and eating together, occasionally going their individual ways.

The arrangement is fairly typical for a group beach house, except most of these groupies are rounding 60.

Chalk this up as yet another shift in the Great American Lifestyle spearheaded by baby boomers.

We boomers shared beach houses with friends and friends-of-friends when we were in our 20s and 30s. And now that 60 is the new 40, we're not ready to give up the tradition.

In fact, Goldstein, 61, and her husband Alan, 68, met in a shared beach house 15 years ago and bought this Ventnor home with the intention of creating their own share.

Shelly Goldstein's parents had met at the beach; her aunt ran a rooming house in Atlantic City for years; she'd gone down-the-Shore faithfully, every weekend, first with her mother, and later, with her girlfriends.

But by the time she reached 40 and was unmarried, Goldstein said, it became increasingly difficult to find friends who were free and flexible enough for a share at the Shore.

So she sought out strangers.

"I decided I was too young to give up what I wanted just because nobody in my immediate circle of friends was into it," she said.

Alan Goldstein was among the new people she met.

He'd grown up in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood, where, he says, folks go to Nantasket Beach for the day. But they don't use the term shoobie.

"There would be wall-to-wall blankets," Alan Goldstein recalls, smiling. "And everyone was listening to the same radio station."

By the end of the summer of 1994, after he and Shelly had shared that first beach house together, Alan told her, "We should buy a house and do this ourselves."

They rented first, and ran that as a share successfully. But it took four years to find a beach house they wanted to buy and could afford.

In the meantime, the Goldsteins moved to Mount Laurel, to a home they continue to live in because both are still working.

Finally, they found a 1920s Tudor on a beach block with inlaid wood floors, a stone fireplace in the 20-by-40-foot living room, original woodwork on the stairs, a deck off the dining room, and a big front porch. They paid $182,000 in 1997. Today, if houses were selling, this one might go for more than a million, he says.

"Not that we would sell," she cautions.

(Yes, you may kick yourself now if you'd like for not being able to see into the future of the real estate market.)