A Delray Beach Woman's Rock n Roll Journey with the Zombies and the Beatles
By Larry Aydlette
The Palm Beach Post
March 20, 2019
February 1964. "The Ed Sullivan Show." America melts down at the sight of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. And when the Beatles go on tour, King is determined to see them. But she's crushed: they're not coming anywhere near her hometown of Grand Forks, North Dakota.
Fortunately, King has a mother every teenager dreams about. She promises to take Nancy and her 18-year-old sister anywhere the moptops are playing. The closest date turns out to be in Vancouver, British Columbia on Aug. 22. Nancy immediately springs into action, writing the Beatles' record company in Los Angeles and getting the band's North American itinerary, including their stay at the Edgewater Inn in Seattle, Washington, for a show the day before.
Mom promptly books them into the same hotel. (These Kings did not mess around.) In the lobby, Nancy overhears men with British accents. She chats them up. One is a reporter for the Liverpool Echo named -- and we're not kidding -- George Harrison.
He calls the Beatles' manager Brian Epstein and vouches for King. After the Seattle show, only one girl can go up to "meet the boys," so her older sister Carolyn relents (which is a pretty good IOU for a sibling to possess).
And so...
"Brian answered the door and Paul was behind him."
For about 30 minutes, it was King, the Beatles, Epstein and the Liverpool reporter in a hospitality suite. She talked mostly to Paul McCartney and George Harrison, "who couldn't have been nicer. John (Lennon) totally ignored me. Paul eventually took me over and introduced me to John, who made some comment about the black hills of Dakota."
Ringo Starr came out from a shower and "he showed me all the rings on his fingers and where he got them." McCartney offered her a cigarette. She declined. They all signed her paperback copy of a novel based on "A Hard Day's Night." She told Paul her favorite Beatles song was "Do You Want to Know A Secret?" He modestly admitted the lyrics were pretty good.
The band discussed a recent prediction from horoscope queen Jeane Dixon that the Beatles' plane would crash on tour. "I remember John saying, 'When your time comes, there's nothing you can do about it,'" King said. "He was philosophical."
And then it was over. King returned to her room -- and burst into tears. What was she going to do with the rest of her life now?
"I was up crying all night, saying, 'I can't believe my dream came true.'"
The next morning, a puffy-eyed King had her picture taken with Epstein. The Vancouver concert was "anticlimactic," she remembered. "They were a little speck on the field, you couldn't hear them, the girls were screaming so loud."
But back home, she was an instant celebrity, Grand Forks' lone link to Beatlemania. The local paper wrote about her. She was invited to gab about George's eye color and Paul's hair on air. And she soon had a gig interviewing British Invasion bands for her hometown radio station.
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