Tale of Four Teens on Beatle Hunt (Chicago 1965)

Tale of Four Teens on Beatle Hunt

By Mary Maher

The Chicago Tribune

August 27, 1965

 

Four 16-year-old Louisville girls went home last week with treasured relics, four crumbled, stained paper napkins that touched the lips of the Beatles after their morning meal. At least that's what one woman said. The salesperson charged the girls only $1 a piece and made them promise not to tell anyone of the favor she had done them. Just a shadow of doubt crossed Carol Francisco's mind. “My napkin had icing on it, and I didn't see any sweet rolls on the breakfast tray, but Lib said she thought John might have had a sweet roll.”

 “Every hero becomes a bore, at last”, said Emerson, so it's possible that someday John and Paul, George and Ringo may be reduced to disposing of their napkins, soap scraps, cigarette butts and discarded newspapers, in the manner of most mortals. At the moment, their debris is probably the fastest-moving commodity on the teen market.

 Carol, Lib (Olivia Morris), Alana Nash, and Louise Carsten were among the 60,000 fans who came up with $5.50 tickets last Friday to watch the Beatles writhe thu performances in Comiskey Park. Hundreds more broke curfew laws and police lines, on the chance that they might somehow make more personal contact with the demigods.

The girls from Louisville spent $250—6 months of planning on their project. But for them, as for the others, it was fruitless. A Beatle hunt is one of the most unrewarding junkets a human can participate in. It requires long-range scheming and devious strategy.

Last February, Carol sent for tickets to both Beatles shows. She and her friends began writing for reservations in Chicago hotels, eliminating only those that asked for deposits. They ended up with rooms reserved in 13 hotels and were reprimanded for their tactic only once. Two hotels under one ownership, apparently, compared letters and refused to cooperate.

 The Hilton Hotel’s replies snagged plans, too. Carol's father, the Reverend Clyde T Francisco, is a faculty member of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville. The girls wrote to the hotels on his official stationery, identifying themselves as seminary students, and when the Hilton politely offered them reduced student rates in the dormitory section, the girls decided not to pursue the matter.

 But they needn't have feared resistance from Hotel Management. The hotel where the Beatles stayed was accepting reservations from teenagers without question, only asking that one of the party be 18 years old. Carol's group brought along Sylvia Bohannon, a college senior, as a chaperone.

From Thursday afternoon until Saturday morning, the girls joined several 100 other fans in befriending porters, police guards, waitresses, and bellhops in an effort to get to the fifth-floor suite where the Beatles were ensconced. Nothing availed, but they did get a close look at the idols once, when they arrived at nearly 4 a.m. on Friday.

 “I touched Paul”, said Olivia, “I  asked him if I could touch him, and he nodded.” Carol was close enough to their limousine to toss her gifts through the window. They were large, framed, carefully done sketches of the Beatles' famous faces. “They fell in John's lap. He just glanced through them and left them there. He didn't care. They don't care. And they didn't nod at us or even look at us. They ignored everyone.”

 With 500 others, the girls waited for five hours to glimpse the Beatles. The next day, when they left the hotel for their afternoon concert, The Beatles finally crept out the back door, where only a small group were privileged enough to rush them and witness the terror on their faces.

 They stayed up all Friday night without success. “The whole hotel was like a dormitory”, said Carol. “All the kids were up all night visiting and trying to get to the fifth floor, but the Beatles press agents and the hotel managers were as mean as ever, yelling at us to stay in our rooms.”

 They were disappointed, but not as disappointed as the girl from a town in Indiana who told her mother she was staying at the home of a friend and diffused her bankroll on an $18 single hotel room.

 Carol says she wouldn't do it again. “I don't like them as much as I did, but it was fun just trying to get to them. And we did get closer than a lot of kids, and the shows were great, of course.” Carol admitted you couldn't hear much over the screening, “but what you could hear them, they weren't off key, like they were last year.”