Haven’t posted here in a while. About time I did. So herewith, a memory.
True story: on the day John Lennon was killed, I had turned in a paper I wrote for my high school sociology class concerning gun control. And as a young smartass and White Album fan, I had titled the paper, “Happiness is a Warm Gun.”
I had just turned 17 and I was a senior in high school. I learned the news as I sat at the dining room table, which was where I typically did my homework in those days. I had lugged out the massive, cobalt blue IBM Selectric typewriter my dad had brought home from the office. I was typing up a paper for my Honors English class that was due the next morning; if I remember correctly, it concerned Eugene O’Neill’s play “The Hairy Ape.” I could see the television set in the living room and Monday Night Football was on. Then ol’ Howard Cosell told us: John Lennon had been shot dead in New York City.
It’s easy to forget now, but it was the beginning of a very violent 10-month period. At the end of that long winter of 1980-81, President Reagan nearly died at the hands of an assassin. Not long after, Pope John Paul II nearly met his maker. By the fall, Anwar Sadat was felled.
My generation was too young to really understand the events of the 1960s, especially the toll of the assassins that blighted the decade. We had come of age in the 1970s, a time that seemed simultaneously grim and silly. It was easy for me, and for a lot of my classmates, to adopt a mask of adolescent cynicism and to sneer at what we saw in front of us.
When Lennon was killed that night, I was thinking the cynicism I felt about my life and my future prospects was somehow justified. I felt constrained by the town I had called home. I kept thinking to myself — I can’t wait to get the hell out of this place. It wasn’t for me, this Appleton, Wisconsin. There was no way I would ever come back to Podunk and I sneered at those who were content to stay and settle for the blandishments of a boring little town, a suburb without a city attached to it. Once I left, I did not return. That much was true. Still, I was wrong about my town, though you couldn’t have convinced me otherwise.
The thing was, that cynicism had a very thin veneer. I remember when we were discussing the murder in school the next day, one of my friends reported the reaction of Mick Jagger, who purportedly called Lennon’s murder “a good career move” or something like that. I didn’t know if Jagger actually said it (and it turns out he didn’t), but we were all convinced it was the worst thing we’d ever heard and some of my friends vowed to get rid of their Stones albums in protest. They didn’t, as I recall.
Adolescents are often like that — simultaneously full of dreams and full of crap. Many, many things have changed in the 43 years since John Lennon died. One thing hasn’t — I still write at the dining room table. And, in 2023 at the age of 60, I’m actually less cynical than I was in 1980 at the age of 17. No matter how rotten the world might look at any given moment, there are always opportunities if we choose to see them.
I was in my senior year. I was at the city ice rink for the skating unit in “gym class”.
Lesa MacEwan, perhaps the most beautiful girl in North Dakota at the time, was “showing me how to skate”, skating backwards as she towed me across the ice. I’d been skating since I was eight years old, but…Lesa MacEwan. Stay with me, here.
The arena PA system was tuned to KFYR in Bismark, playing whatever was on the Top 40 at the time.
About the time Lesa got me out to the middle of the ice, the jock (“Black Jack Dick Novak”) came out of a song and announced what’d happened.
I wasn’t a yuge Beatles fan at the time – I was into the Kinks, and of course to this day people remember what an over the top Who fan I was. I was a few years too young for the Beatles to have been a direct impact on me. But I learned a lot watching Baby Boom society grapple with the murder over the next month.
Ah, the carefree naive times of youth. I remember the watching news reports on TV, seeing Walter Cronkite in a tan trench coat and holding a microphone while standing out in front of Lennon’s apartment building, and my mom tearfully exclaiming “OH NO!!” As a 10 year old, I had heard of the Beatles, but had no comprehension of their history nor impact on culture.
On a plus note: At that time, I was also blissfully unaware of Yoko Ono.
*watching the
I remember being mostly unaware of the Beatles and the significance of John’s death at the time, but I do remember people calling radio stations to protest their playing Yoko’s work in mourning for John.