Ringo's Love Code

I am sure you are all familiar with the two girls that Ringo met on the beach in Miami 50 years ago.   If you recall, Ringo took one of them out on a date and then later, we see Ringo's wife to be, Maureen wearing the exact same bathing suit as the girl that Ringo dated in Miami.  Well I have always been a bit curious about these girls and how it happened that they met Ringo.   I located a little story about them in the February 1984 issue of Life Magazine.

Miami mustered a welcoming committee for the Beatles that included four bathing beauties, a chimpanzee and 7000 shrieking teenager girls, who in their crush to get just a little closer broke 23 windows and a plate glass door in the airline terminal.  Few fans were rewarded with more than a distant glimpse, but three seniors from Miami Beach High, who were working as models at a car show, got lucky.  A photographer asked best friends Barbara Turchin, Carol Olesky and Diane Levine if they would like to pose with the Beatles at the beach.  They were skeptical but turned up for the pictures session and an hour and a half later, the Beatles did too.  Shots of Ringo with his arms around Barbara and Carol appeared in Modern Screen and on the cover of Inside Movie magazine.  The girls were invited to The Ed Sullivan Show in a Miami Beach hotel, but after that Carol kept her distance.   "My mother wouldn't let me go out with them," she explains, "and I had a boyfriend."  Barbara became the object of Ringo's singular, if transient, attention, while Paul was smitten by Diane.  The four of them double-dated at a drive in movie theater.  Barbara invited Ringo home to dinner.  He arrived concealed in a Hertz moving van and the family was amused when her grandmother kept calling him Hugo and tugging at his hair to see if it was  a wig.  Ringo pounded out boogie-woogie on the piano to entertain Barbara's younger brothers.  "Music just poured out of them all the time," says Barbara of the group.  "They'd compose a song right on the spot."  Ringo's parting gift to her was a ring with a gold "R" in a black onyx stone, which, for a time, she wore on a chain around her neck.  Barbara, now a Miami designer of silk quilts about to enter her third marriage, and Carol, an Annapolis, Maryland housewife, have maintained both their friendship and a wise perspective on their brush with fame 20 years ago.  "It was an exciting time in my life," says Barbara, "but I'm not waiting for the Beatles to come back or anything."