February 9th 1964

okay this is time number seven i'm going to attempt to do this podcast think i'll be successful i don't know a lot of young people listen to this and they're probably not going to get it but some of you older people should pop right up for you should in november of 1963 our thriving country was essentially just totally shut down when in dallas texas president john f kennedy was killed guy shot in the head killed and dead yeah there was that if you were around back then and i was it was i was in sixth grade and i happened to have stayed home from school that day because i wasn't feeling good and i was watching the movie in black and white on television called mrs x i think it was and i was three quarters of the way through the movie when walter cronkite broke in and told us what was going on and that was the end of television for four days because it was all news that had never happened before in my life and that had never ever happened before in my life and the country went into a very deep depression mental depression not financial depression but mental depression nothing was making anyone happy it was the beginning of winter and everything was gloomy and in michigan where i lived there was snow everywhere and it was just a real crappy winter and i went to catholic school in a little town called hastings michigan st rose of lima catholic school and in order for me to go to st rose of lima catholic school in hastings michigan i lived 11 miles away from there and my father just you know my kids are going to catholic school before that i was in a two-room country school called the calver school loved it there absolutely loved it there but my dad got some wild hair up his ass and decided that we were going to catholic school hated catholic school but anyway for us to go there i had to ride on the high school bus that took you to hastings high school and i was a kid i'm in sixth grade i'm a kid and i'm riding with all these high school kids it was somewhat embarrassing and well it was just weird and they dropped us off a good i don't know 45 minutes before catholic school started so i would go to the library at the high school and read books and read magazines and i remember looking at life magazine and i saw this group you know in the winter that was just tearing up the charts everywhere and i didn't listen to radio in those days because radio had just become so depressing i wanted to listen to radio but we had the radio station that was available to us did not play the hits there was a station in battle creek that did but i couldn't get it where i lived so anyway i see this group on february 9th 1964 the dead cold of winter my family gathered and we watched the ed sullivan show and ed sullivan had brought this group that had been in life magazine to america to appear on television they were the beatles now i didn't expect to have my life changed by that i just was going to see who this group was as a matter of fact how dense i was i didn't read the article in life magazine i just looked at the picture and i saw a picture of two of the beatles together and i thought the beatles were only two people so i wasn't terribly interested but we all gathered together and we sat in the living room and ed sullivan was on and he introduced the beatles and there were four of them and three of them played guitars and one of them played drums and they had this really weird hair like nothing i'd ever seen before okay it was like nothing i'd ever ever seen before and they started out by playing a song called all my loving and the crowd in the theater there in new york city the crowd was just going crazy it was mostly young women and they were screaming and they were crying and it was just the most insane thing i'd ever seen after all my loving they did till there was you and which was a ballad there's a meredith wilson cover and they did that and they did it so beautifully then by the way in those days they had something called chyrons what that was what chiron was was basically lettering that they would put on the screen where they introduced you to all of the beatles it was george paul you know ringo and john and underneath john's name it said sorry girls he's married then right after that by the way they were playing like one song after another after another and then they did she loves you that was incredible then ed came back on and you know he's you youngsters are really i was floored i was just absolutely floored oh man and then after a couple of other acts they brought the beatles back on and the first song that they started with was i saw her standing there and they ended with i want to hold your hand at that point i knew my life had changed forever what i didn't realize is that the world had changed forever on february 9th 1964 the united states of america and the whole entire world was depressed because in november one of the most beloved leaders of the world was killed and we just were sitting around not knowing what to do and then these guys showed up on television and i just said to myself my whole life has been changed now i mean totally and completely changed now i couldn't sleep when i went to bed that night i was just so excited about it and i knew that the next day there was a record shop in hastings and instead of going to the high school in the morning i was going to the record shop and i went straight to the record shop and i bought the single i want to hold your hand it was 85 cents and i gathered that money up out of my little bank and i took it and i bought this single and i brought it home and i played it over and over and over and over again my father wanted to do terrible things to me but that was just the way it was and by the way that next morning when i got up and i walked out to what had up until then been a very gray wintry time it was almost like our lives were in black and white since november it is almost like our lives were in black and white and when i got up that morning to go to school i walked out the back door to go to the bus stop and there was snow on the ground and there was trees blowing and the sun was shining and it was vibrant color we went from a black and white world to a vibrant full color world after watching four people from england in black and white on television i don't know man i want to go to new york city on february 9th i've always wanted to do this and i haven't done it i want to go to new york city on february 9th and i want to worm my way into the ed sullivan theater early in the morning you know when they're not doing anything when they're not taping you know the television show that airs there at night and i want to sit in the fifth row in front of that stage and just take in the history for five minutes i just want to sit there quietly and just look at the stage and take in the history and then i want to go back out to the side take a cab back to jfk same day and fly back to florida that's what i want to do i've been to new york city many times and i've actually walked past the ed sullivan theater before and i just want to go there and i want to sit and i want to take in the history i don't think that's too much to ask i'm getting older i'm in my 70s now i just want to sit there take it all in five minutes that's it i'm going to figure out how to get in there but i'm good at that i have a son who lives up there in new jersey who works in new york city in entertainment and i think he can figure out a way to get me in there if not i'll get in there because i'm good at that five minutes suck it all in we'll see you tomorrow you