I Remember

Have patience with an old man today. I had occasion to remember back to when I was younger, much younger. There was a flash of file film showing the Beatles arrival in New York. In the back ground they were playing "Hard Days Night" and than they cut to their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. I realize that even admitting that you were alive when the Beatles were together makes you old, remembering their first appearance in the U. S. is like admitting you are tantamount to a fossil.

I was working at The Interlachen Country Club in Edina, Minnesota. The Beatles were the rage. If you were over the age of thirty, they were the bane of the nation, the epitome of what was wrong with kids in that day and the foreshadowing of the doom of the nation. But I had heard all of that about Elvis Presley and my father had heard that about jazz and bi-bop. The world was still spinning and the sun still came up.

The Sunday evening of the Ed Sullivan appearance, I was working the main dinning room. We had a fair amount of families dinning. The television set was on in the lounge area. There was no announcement, but just before the mop headed group took the stage and the always stiff Ed Sullivan introduced them, the lounge filled with the curious, concerned and converted.

I can't even remember for sure what they played, but I'll bet "Hard Days Night" was one of them. For weeks after that evening, our Puerto Rican dishwasher would sing that song endlessly. Nobody thought of it at the time, but two things were happening. The Brits were taking over American Music. The Beatles would open the door for The Stones, Clampton, Bowie, Elton John and on and on. And that Puerto Rican kid should have told us that they might take over the world