30 years later, it's still hard to fathom Lennon's killing
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/07/AR2010120702440.html
By Matt Hurwitz
December 7, 2010
Dec. 8, 1980. That's a date every Beatles fan over 40 remembers: the
day John Lennon was shot and killed. We all know where we were and
what we were doing when we found out. It's hard to believe it's been
30 years - harder still to believe it happened at all.
I grew up in Potomac and became a Beatles fan in 1974, when my
brother, Mark, gave me my first Beatles album - "Something New" from
1964. I immediately ran out to Waxie Maxie's in Congressional Plaza
and bought all four of the Beatles' then-current solo singles. I was hooked.
I bought every album and single I could, building a pretty
substantial collection (which I still have). On the night of Dec. 8,
1980, I was in the architecture school studio at the University of
Maryland working late. The radio was tuned to DC101. A little after
11 p.m., I heard the DJ - who apparently read the copy cold - say,
"This just in: Former Beatle John Lennon was shot and killed in New
York City. Oh my God!"
I couldn't believe it. Was this really happening? Somebody would
shoot a Beatle? Why John? What was all this?
Stunned, I just sat there listening to the report, until someone told
me I had a phone call. My roommate, Jeff, had been watching "Monday
Night Football," on which, like many Americans, he heard ABC's Howard
Cosell break the news about John. Jeff immediately called me, wanting
to know how I was doing. It was then that I cried.
John Lennon was dead.
I graduated from Maryland and eventually moved to Los Angeles, where
I still live. Having rekindled my interest in the Beatles, I took
over a Beatles fanzine, Good Day Sunshine, in 1995, and ran it for
about five years.
The guy who sold me the magazine was Charles F. Rosenay!!! (yes,
those exclamation points are legally part of his name). He began
organizing Beatles fan conventions in 1978 and was planning one for
Boston in December 1980.
Like me, a little after 11 p.m. on Dec. 8, he received a call from a
friend who gave him the news. "I thought he was kidding, like another
'Paul is dead' hoax," Rosenay!!! says. "I hung up on him."
But the calls kept coming. He turned on the TV and heard the reports.
Cosell repeated the news. Then a call from ABC Radio, and one from
another network. "All I remember from that night was, for hours,
doing interviews," he recalls. "They wanted a 'spokesperson,' someone
who was a Beatles fan. They wanted to know how to get ahold of people
who might have known John."
Rosenay!!! decided the convention - scheduled for that weekend -
would go on. "The fans needed it. It was cathartic. We needed to
commiserate and share together."
It wasn't until the next Monday, after the whirlwind of news and
conventions had passed, that the reality of Lennon's death finally
sank in. "I was driving in the car with my mom, and 'Starting Over'
came on the radio. I pulled over, and I just started crying. For 20
minutes, I just cried. He was as close to me as someone could be
without me knowing them," he says.
'Real emotional moment'
Nine hundred miles south, in Decatur, Ga., Bill King had just put
together a second anniversary issue of his magazine, Beatlefan - now
the longest-running Beatles fanzine in the United States - which had
launched in December 1978. His wife, Leslie, returned from the
typesetter's a little after 11. "I greeted her at the door, smiling.
She said, 'You haven't heard,' " he recalls.
King was the rock critic and music reporter for the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution. "I called the city desk, to see if they needed
anything, and dictated a bunch of background of Lennon for them." His
instinctual "reporter mode" on, he hopped in his car and headed to
work, listening to reports on the radio as he drove.
King and his wife decided to scrap their planned anniversary issue of
Beatlefan and put out a Lennon tribute issue. "This is before the
days of e-mail - we sent out mailgrams from the Postal Service to all
our contributors, asking for pieces. We had the issue delivered to
the printer on Christmas Eve, the first fan publication tribute to
him out there."
Again, it wasn't until the dust settled, after days of being
interviewed himself, that King had a chance to grieve the loss of one
of his favorite humans: "Yoko, John's widow, had called for a few
minutes of silence around the world a few days after his death. I was
listening to it on the radio, and . . . that was a real emotional
moment for me. The reporter's instinct got me through the first 24
hours without having time to grieve. But in that moment, I did."
'Worst day of my life'
Mark Lapidos never needed a reminder of when Lennon's birthday was -
his father's was also Oct. 9. In late 1973, the Sam Goody Records
store manager decided to put together Beatlefest - now called the
Fest for Beatles Fans (www.thefest.com) - a popular annual fan
convention, still hugely successful, the first of which was held in
New York the next September.
Six years later, on Dec. 8, the Lapidoses were about to board a plane
in Los Angeles to return east, having just signed contracts for a
Beatlefest at the Bonaventure Hotel for the next year. "We were at
the airport, and somebody I knew paged me," he says. "That's how I found out."
Lapidos spent the red-eye flight in shock. "I asked the flight
attendant to ask the crew if they could verify what I'd been told.
Maybe it was misinformation - maybe it was Jack Lemmon." Upon landing
in New York, the couple got into a cab for a ride home. Lapidos asked
the driver, " 'Is it true?' He just answered, 'Yes.' "
Lapidos called his brother, who told him that, for the first time
he'd ever seen, "people were just walking the streets of New York,
openly crying." He stayed in his home for a week, sickened by the
grief. "It was the worst day of my life. It still hurts, all these
years later."
'It was just . . . awful'
In Liverpool, England, Jean Catharell was lying in her bed blissfully
unaware of what had taken place in New York a few hours earlier. Then
her husband startled her awake: "You need to get up."
Catharell can remember seeing the Beatles play in clubs and other
venues around Liverpool in 1963, just before the international
explosion of Beatlemania. She put on Radio Merseyside, which was
playing Lennon's "Imagine" and repeating the bad news.
Eventually Catharell pulled herself together enough to go into town
to Mathew Street, Liverpool's famous main thoroughfare. "When I got
there, there were people wandering up and down the street, carrying
candles, guitars," she says.
Opposite the Cavern, the famed hole-in-the-wall club where the
Beatles' career began, a shrine of Lennon artifacts began to
assemble. "There were things like the Lennon cap and T-shirts. People
had given up some of their treasures just to pay homage to John," she says.
Catharell lingered outside the Cavern. "I couldn't tell how long I
sat there. Hours and hours. I sat there till it was dark," she says
in her lyrical Liverpool accent. "It must have been quite a long time
because the candles were lighting up the street. It was just . . . it
was just awful."
'He believed in peace'
In Southern California, Kristy Mundt stayed home from work the day
after Lennon's murder. "It brought back all the awful memories of
losing John and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King," she says. "The
Beatles had come just after JFK's assassination, right at the right
time, to get young people out of that rut and that depression. And
now somebody had killed John."
In 1995, not long after joining the Come Together Beatles Fan Club in
San Diego, Mundt heard that Lennon's killer, Mark David Chapman, who
had been sentenced to 20 years to life, might, in five more years, be
getting out of prison.
So Mundt began circulating petitions, gathering signatures of fans
who also didn't want to see Chapman out of jail - ever. "I realized
that, if nobody did anything, he might just slip through the cracks
and be out and free to do whatever he wanted to do, and he should not
be allowed to do that," she says.
There was another reason. "It was my opinion that, if he got out,
somebody was going to kill him," she says. "And I didn't believe that
was something that John would want. He didn't believe in an eye for
an eye, he believed in peace."
Mundt gathered 700 signatures the weekend of the Beatle Fair and by
October 2000, after circulating the petition online and to fan clubs
around the world, had 35,000 signatures. So the grocery clerk from
San Diego flew to Attica State Prison in Upstate New York - on her
own dime - to deliver the signatures and protest Chapman's possible
release outside the prison gates. (He is still in prison.)
"John's death was such a waste," Mundt says. "It was one of the
stupidest things ever done. I'm 58 now - I look at what I've
accomplished in the last 18 years, since I was 40," says the breast
cancer survivor. "To have that time taken away, in your own life . .
. it's just a waste."
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