Baby Boomers Remember Growing Up with the Fab Four

 

Baby Boomers Remember Growing Up with the Fab Four

By Patti Lanigan

The Brattleboro Reformer

November 27, 1995

    The first time the Beatles performed on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, Beth Johnston captured the Fab Four in photographs she took of the television screen with her Brownie camera. Watching with her grandmother, she now says she was fairly subdued, but inside she felt just like the girls in the studio audience who were screaming, crying and swooning.

     My whole life began to rotate around the Beatles after that", the Saco woman recall. Now, 25 years after the group broke up, 15 years after John Lennon's death, and just in time for the holidays, The Beatles are invading America again. This time, America is ready.

     Newcomers to Beatlemania and longtime fans like Johnston were prepared to preserve every second of a heavily hyped three-part ABC anthology that aired last week. They're prepared to purchase reissued videos and a double CD, Beatles Anthology, featuring previously unreleased songs, including one in which Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr play and sing along with a track Lennon recorded years ago on a demo tape. 

    The videotape programs and new recordings will be added to personal collections of Beatles albums, memorabilia, ephemera,  and stories about growing up and growing old with The Beatles and their music. 

    Johnston, a 43-year-old Saco mother of three, who works part-time in cable television, remembers forming a Beatles fan club in North Carolina with six of her friends. They held a birthday party on each of the Beatles' birthdays. McCartney was Johnston's favorite, so she threw the Paul party. "He is and was a literally gorgeous guy", she says, with the kind of girlish giggle that emerges when a woman who was a teenager in the Beatles' heyday remembers the one who made her heart throb. With Paul McCartney, it was love at first sight. "I really always felt he had a romantic center and a good heart," she says.

    The hope of one day meeting McCartney burns like an eternal flame in Johnston's heart. In London eight years ago, she left a letter at his office, saying she would like to meet him. When they toured about five years ago, she attended six shows and even rushed the stage at one. "I got out of my seat and got within 25 feet of him before the guard said, 'Get out of here. " she says. "I was just so completely excited, I almost missed the experience of standing near him."

     Irene Halasz, who grew up in Saco, got closer. For starters, she was one of the 55,000 who actually saw the Beatles live at Shea Stadium in New York in 1965. She and her sister Cindy ordered tickets months in advance from The Beatles fan club and sweet-talked their mother into letting them go down by bus and stay in a hotel.

     "People were screaming and making a run for the stage. The woman in front of us took her clothes off," she remembers. "Maybe she thought she would catch their attention. We were so far up they probably couldn't see her."

     The 48-year-old South Berwick resident was a 16-year-old Thornton Academy student when she made the journey to the Big Apple to see the Fab Four. "They brought the Beatles in and took them out by ambulance. The concert was unbelievable. There was so much emotion. It was probably the most wonderful experience of my life." She says they even played her favorite song "Yesterday."

     A year or two later, in London, Halasz, no older than 18, bumped into her favorite Beatle, McCartney, on the street. I remember saying, "I love you. I think you're wonderful," She recalls. "I think I was standing there with my mouth open. He was really friendly."

     Halasz heard the news of Lennon's murder at home after working all day at Zayre's in Waterville. "I called my best friend, who knew I was a Beatles freak. He drove up from Portland. I just didn't want to be alone," she says.

     Tuesday, when the new CD went on sale, Halasz now, the manager of the Navy exchange at Portman Naval Shipyard in Kittery planned to snag a copy to add to her collection of Beatles records.

     Robert Stone was more aggressive than Johnston or Halasz at trying to meet McCartney. The 44-year-old English teacher, who lives in Lebanon, says that the summer before his senior year at Nasson College, he hitchhiked around England and Scotland.

     Along with youths from all over the world, he hung out around Apple Records until he met a receptionist and got McCartney's Scotland address. He hitchhiked to Scotland and walked from a nearby village to what he describes as the "long and winding road" to the farm. When he walked into the yard, he says, a lady with long blonde hair came out and crossed her arms. "I told her I flew from the States and hitched up from London and asked if Paul was around. She said he was horseback riding, and I shouldn't wait."  Stone says he respected her wish to be left alone. Asked her to tell Paul "Stoney says, Hello" and walked back up the hill where a young woman he met on the long and winding road was also hoping to meet McCartney, who was watching. "She started jumping up and down and pointing," Stone says. Paul McCartney rode into the yard on a horse with his English sheepdog, Martha, who inspired the song, "Martha My Dear". He and Linda went walking arm in arm into the house.

     "My life had been fulfilled", he says, adding that he measures his early life by what was happening with the Beatles and that he always favored Paul. Revolver and Yellow Submarine are his favorite albums, and he treasures his Beatles lunchbox, Yellow Submarine posters, and reel-to-reel tapes of recording sessions. Most of all, he treasures a rock he took from McCartney's yard.

     Seeing film clips of English girls going crazy over the Beatles on the Jack Parr Show mystified Joe Pfrangle, a 44-year-old postal worker from Wells. "It was nothing I'd ever seen," he says. "When the British Invasion first came, I thought the Beatles were a little too scruffy. I was a Dave Clark Five man." But the Beatles' music won him over and made him a fan for the rest of his life. "They were the only ones from the get-go playing their own music", he says, "music rooted in early American music by Elvis Presley. Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Carl Perkins."

 The fact that new fans are sprouting all the time testifies to the Beatles' appeal and longevity.