Beatles Memories

I spent 90 minutes with the Beatles Sunday night. Well, with two of the Beatles and millions of their fans, that is. CBS had a 50th Anniversary celebration of The Beatles first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show on February 9th, 1964.

In 1964, I was an unhappy little girl who had just been moved from Montana to South Dakota in the middle of winter, leaving the familiar behind. Friends, school, what passed for a home then, all gone. We moved into doctor's family housing at the State Hospital in Yankton and life continued. So really the last thing on my mind was the four "mop tops" and their appearance on American television.

I do remember watching the show that night, because my parents always watched Ed Sullivan. I thought they were fun and the music was good, but at that age they could have been The Muppets and I would have thought the same. My parents who loved a wide array of music, were however, most emphatically not-- fans of rock-n-roll, but they kept watching and basically shrugged after the Beatles performance.

Years later, one of the first 45s I bought, (yes kids--that is a small vinyl disc, with a hole in the middle, which back then was called a record), was "Lady Madonna". It was very controversial because it had the lyric, "baby at your breast" in it. I was in Catholic school at the time and just having that record was blasphemous, but I was a rebel! My friend Connie and I played it, sang along and danced until the record was white.

Still, for me, the "Fab Four" were just another group who had some great music. I saved my love for The Monkees, David Cassidy, The Bee Gees and Donny Osmond, "because they were the cutest!!". I cared not that those four young men had already made history, changed the music world forever and influenced every musician since.

The reason I took this trip down memory lane is because of the picture above. I was looking for pictures of hotels and came across this photo of the Beatles fishing out the window of their hotel room in Seattle when they were there on tour in 1964. I instantly recognized the hotel as The Edgewater because we had stayed there in a very similar room when we went to the World's Fair in 1962.

So from this moment on, I plan to tell myself they stayed in the same room we did. It is possible you know.