Forty years. Really?
Tuesday marked 40 years since Dec. 8, 1980, the night Frank Gifford paused during a “Monday Night Football” broadcast and said “Howard, you have got to say what we know in the booth.”
“Yes, we have to say it,” said Howard Cosell, who usually didn’t need much prompting to say anything.
There was no Twitter, Facebook or cell phones in those days, and no 24-hour news channels. No sports announcer had ever broken a story like this, and none would ever have to do it again.
The words still send a chill up my spine:
“An unspeakable tragedy confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City – John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York City — the most famous, perhaps, of all of the Beatles — shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital. Dead on arrival.”
The last three words are where the chill comes in. Every. Single. Time.
I didn’t hear it live. But like all of us from that era, I remember exactly where I was, and what I was doing, when I found out. That’s the impact the band had on most people of my generation; for those of us too young to remember the assassination of John F. Kennedy, this was our JFK moment.
Every December 8, millions of us share memories of that night with friends and strangers on social media. Today, I’ll share mine with you.
I was at the movies. My best friend, Jeff Gravitt, was home on leave from the Air Force, and we went to Rodgers Theater in our hometown of Corning to watch a movie called “The Nude Bomb,” a forgettable reunion effort from the cast of “Get Smart.”
Afterward, we headed out in my Dodge Charger and pulled into the Shell station to visit our friend Dennis Shiffer, just as we’d done hundreds of times before. We were young and the whole small-town night was ahead of us … or so we thought.
“Aren’t you guys in a bad mood?” Dennis asked, noticing we got out of the car with our usual jocularity intact. “Why?” I asked.
“John Lennon got killed. Howard Cosell just said on Monday Night Football.”
It didn’t register, even coming from a trusted friend. There had to be a mistake. Already in a bit of a daze, I walked back to my car and turned on the radio — tuned to KFRC, as always in those days.
“The Ballad of John and Yoko” was on. It came to an end, and the disc jockey — I think it was John Mack Flanagan — said “KFRC remembers John Lennon.” The next song was “I Want To Hold Your Hand.”
That’s when I knew.
“I Want to Hold Your Hand.” The song that started the whole thing in America in early 1964. Some people in the world of “rock journalism” — a term that didn’t exist before the Beatles — said that song took off partially because we’d lost Kennedy to an assassin’s bullets a couple of months earlier. We needed our hands held. Those four funny looking guys with long hair from England stepped in at just the right time, writing songs like no one had heard before and performing them with a look so out of this world, half the country thought they must have been wearing wigs.
The country, and much of the world, united around something fun. When was the last time that happened to such a degree?
The Beatles grew, and changed, from there. We all did, and those songs marked every step of many journeys, even long after the band disbanded.
And then, with a few shots, Lennon was dead, and to quote one of his songs, the dream was over.
Those were the thoughts racing through my head as I sat behind the wheel that night and listened, fighting back tears while marveling that somehow, “I Want To Hold Your Hand” sounded as fresh as it did the first time I heard it as a child.
I don’t remember much else about that night other than my best friend and I stayed up for hours trying to make sense of it all — knowing that all around the world, countless others were doing the same.
We didn’t just lose a favorite singer; we felt like we’d lost a friend, a soul brother we’d never met, a rebel, and a true original the likes of which we’d never know again. To many of us, especially those who ever felt like a sane outlier looking in on a crazy world with glee, John Lennon was the Beatle.
The initial shock faded with time, but at any given moment — a song, a memory — the old feelings come back, even 40 years later.
The proof is still in that chill in my spine, every time I hear those words.
Dead. On. Arrival.
Mike Wolcott is editor of the Enterprise-Record. He can be reached at mwolcott@chicoer.com, or you can follow him on Twitter @m_mwolcott. If you’ve got a memory of Dec. 8, 1980, he’d love to hear it.
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