The Beatles and Me

by Pa Rock
Cultural Commentator

Liverpool Hope University, located in Liverpool, England, the boyhood home of the Fab Four, will be offering a Master of Arts degree in The Beatles. The title of the project is The Beatles, Popular Music and Society. It will consist of four twelve-week sessions and a dissertation. Mike Brocken, the senior lecturer in popular music at Hope University noted that there have been over 8,000 books about the Beatles, but there has never been a serious academic course of study on this group that revolutionized music in the second half of the twentieth century.

The Beatles arrived in America on February 7, 1964, leading what has come to be called The British Invasion. John Kennedy had been killed less than three months before their arrival, and America, especially the youth of America, were ready to move on. When the Beatles set foot on the shores of America, they brought the fire that lit the fuse that forever changed this country and the world.

The Beatles were a very big deal.

When the Beatles first came to America I was six weeks short of turning sixteen and getting my driver's license. We were still living at Riverview Court, but would move into town (Noel) at the end of that summer. My dad had a television and appliance store in Noel, and consequently we had the first color television in town. I remember watching The Ed Sullivan Show the night of their debut. The television cameras were focused on the four skinny kids with mop tops singing on the stage, but they would also pan around to take in the screaming young people in the audience. I'll always remember my dad saying, "My God, are they that popular?" Yes, they were, from note one.

(Thirty-five years later I would be sitting in that same theatre watching a "live" taping of Late Night with David Letterman, amazed that I was that close to the actual stage where the Beatles made their U.S. debut.)

The Beatles first single (they were vinyl with two songs in those days, one on each side) was "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" with "She Loves You" on the reverse. They sang both on the Sullivan show.

(Those records were called 45's because they spun around at 45 revolutions per minute. Albums were also vinyl and played at 33-and-a-third revolutions per minute. Really old records, the ones from my parents' youth were also still around. They were called 78's - care to guess why? America was changing rapidly - within months we would begin hearing about something called 8-track tapes!)

This was a couple of years before the serious advent of FM radio, so we listened to AM. The two most popular stations for young people were WHB in Kansas City which covered much of the midwest, and WLS in Chicago which was one of the preeminent radio stations in America. The primary evening DJ at WLS was Dick Biondi, and I have heard that he still hosts an oldies program on the radio.

But I digress. I brought up WLS and WHB because that is generally where the small town kids got to hear pop music. I remember that late in the summer of 1964, there was one week when the Beatles had eight of the top ten singles in America. They were a mighty big deal.

I saw the two Beatles movies - "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help!" at the Ozark Theatre in Noel. That was in the days before music videos. Elvis had made dozens of movies to keep his music, face, and moves before the public. The Beatles literally blew him off of the charts, and, as if to add insult to injury, they were quickly up on the silver screen in what must now look like a cross between music videos and Marx Brothers' movies.

I enjoyed being a part of the generation that came of age with the Beatles and the other dynamite groups and bands of British Invasion. The music was great and has held up well. That was back in the day when you could still sing along to most tunes on the radio, but we recognized that was rapidly changing. The Beatles themselves began evolving quickly, musically and personally, and before many years had passed the group was history. Today only Paul and Ringo survive.

I lived through that special era, but as with most who are part of something that transformational, the enormity is not realized until the moment has passed. Ten years after the Beatles had broken up, I was teaching history at Liberty High School in Mountain View, MO. That spring I gave my sophomores a lot of latitude in coming up with special projects to present to the class. Two outstanding students, Leigh Ann Adams and Cindy Stanley, did a presentation on the Beatles, with lecture, photos, and music. It was absolutely spellbinding. Suddenly I was very conscious of the amazing cultural era that I had experienced.

The last I heard of Leigh Ann she was teaching English at Southwest Missouri State University at West Plains - but that has been several years ago. I haven't heard anything about Cindy since she graduated from high school. I hope that they find this mention and are able to realize how proud their old teacher still is of the work they did.

When Carla and I were in New York in January we saw the Dakota and the spot out front where John Lennon was gunned down. Yoko Ono still lives there, a little old lady in her seventies. We also walked across the street from the Dakota and into Central Park where Strawberry Fields is located and the Imagine Memorial is set up. The memorial had been decorated with flowers on that cold and snowy day.

The Beatles will eventually all be gone, perhaps during my watch. But their music will live forever...yes it will...yeah, yeah, yeah!

7F2

I was listening to Michael Feldman’s “What Do You Know” program on National Public Radio last Saturday when the host made a statement to the effect that high school kids today have never known a time without cell phones. That simple remark set me spinning on the subject of how fast things are changing. Just on the topic of telephones alone, I have lived through an amazing array of technology.

The first telephone experience that I remember happened before I even started to elementary school. We were living in an old house in Goodman, MO., that was equipped with a crank phone hanging on the wall. My mom asked me to call my dad for some reason, perhaps to see if he was coming home for lunch. I pushed a chair up to the wall so that I could reach the telephone, cranked the handle, and put the ear piece to my ear. Violet, the operator, came on and tried to connect me, but it was just starting to storm and a loud noise came through the line. Violet came back on the line when the noise subsided and asked in a surprised voice, ‘Rocky, are you still there?” We tried again, but the connection couldn’t be made. I hung up the earpiece and had barely moved away from the telephone when a bolt of lightening came through the earpiece and left a black scorch mark on the wall. Timing was everything!

A year or so later we moved to a new house in Goodman and had a very modern black, rotary telephone that probably weighed in at close to ten pounds. The early years of elementary school brought occasional telephone conversations with friends, but the phone was in the living room and privacy was not an option. It was the only telephone in the household, and everyone recognized the need to limit the length of calls.

We moved to Riverview Court when I was ten. The court got its mail on a Noel, MO, rural route, and telephone service was from the perpetually sleepy village of Lanagan. Lanagan had crank telephones, but I knew how to handle those. Lanagan also had a telephonic concept that was new to me: party lines. A party line meant that several customers shared a telephone line. A half dozen or so households were on our party line, so making a call often meant having to wait until the neighbor was done sharing the gossip. If an emergency came up, the person needing the phone had to interrupt the on-going conversation. And it did need to be an emergency, because the person who was interrupted would invariably get back on the line and listen in. Each person on the party line had a unique ring code to let them know if the incoming call was for them. Ours was two long rings. A neighbor’s ring might have been two shorts and a long, or perhaps three shorts, or some other unique combination of shorts and longs. If you were calling someone else on your party line, you had to carefully crank out their ring code. Our telephone number was 7F2, and to this day I have no idea what that signified.

When I was sixteen we moved to the town of Noel. There we were blessed with rotary telephones again, but they were getting lighter and easier to move around. Our house had a rotary phone in the living room, and a rotary phone mounted on the wall in the utility room. The wall phone was an extension, so we were still limited to one person using the telephone at a time.

Push button phones began to make an appearance in the early 1980’s. The first time that I remember becoming aware of the enormity of that cultural change was around 1990 when I was a junior high school principal. A student came to the office to use the phone to call his mother. I directed him to an old rotary phone that was at an empty desk. He stared at it for awhile, and finally asked in a bewildered voice, “How do you start it up?”

In the mid to late 1990’s I worked in Child Protection for the state of Missouri. That job occasionally led me into remote areas where dangerous situations could arise. My agency began signing out “bag phones” to take along on remote visits. Of course, my county was so rural that most of the places we went were unable to get reception. Fortunately, county deputies often accompanied us with their radio-equipped patrol cars.

I entered the modern era in 2000 when I got my first cell phone. Since that time it has become a fixture in my life, and the necessity of having a land line at home has lessened to the point that I practically never use the one I have. But, in defense of my old fashioned values, my cell phone does not play music or games, compute, transmit television shows and movies, or take pictures. At least I don’t think that it does!

One more significant cultural change that has occurred over the years is the virtual disappearance of telephone booths. My first realization of this trend was in the movie “Superman” where Clark Kent (aka Christopher Reeve) prepared to jump into a phone booth to change into his crime fighting gear, only to realize that pay phones were no longer encased in booths! A few years later I was in London and heard that their famous red phone boxes were slowly being removed due to the public’s growing reliance on cell phones. Dr. Who did all of his time and space traveling in a British red phone box.

What’s to become of us mere mortals if Superman is reduced to changing clothes in an alley and Dr. Who has to take the bus?

Telephones have definitely evolved over the fifty plus years that I have been using them, but I have nagging doubts as to whether all of this evolution represents true progress. Are cell phones, the latest link in the evolutionary chain, great liberators that enable people to communicate anywhere at any time? Or are they virtual leashes that tie us to home, and office, and school, and the never-ending roar of civilization? Some days I yearn for the simpler time of crank phones and solitude – and the lightening be damned!

Riverview Court

Two relative constants in my parents’ lives were these: they seldom worked for wages, preferring instead to own and operate their own businesses, and it was a rare day indeed when they paid rent. One of my Dad’s favorite tirades to this day is on the wastefulness of paying rent, or as he puts it, “just throwing your money down a rat hole.” Those two principles came together nicely in the summer of 1958 when they bought a tourist cabin court four miles north of Noel, Missouri, on the beautiful Elk River. Not only would being innkeepers make a nice, seasonal income, the court also boasted living quarters for the owners.

I was ten-years-old and my sister, Gail, was closing in on eight when we were uprooted from our home and friends in Goodman, MO, and moved to Riverview Court. I was excited to be living so close to the river and suspected that it would be a life-changing event, but daily swimming and fishing aside, I had no idea how much of an impact that this unique experience would have on my formative years. We were there six years, a time that proved to be as much of a transition for me personally as it was for the country.

Riverview had eight units, with five of those being kitchenettes that would suit families looking to spend a week or two playing on the river. One night in a sleeping-only cabin ran six dollars, and the kitchenettes ranged from eight to twelve dollars per night depending on the number of beds required. The two largest units were triples, with three double beds each. There were special rates for three-day stays as well as those that lasted a week or more.

It was at Riverview where I learned to work and follow routines. Every morning I had to empty trash from the cabins, dump and clean the garbage cans, and help my mom and Gail clean cabins. We washed sheets and towels in the afternoons, using an old ringer washer with two rinse tubs. I then helped to hang the laundry outside to dry, and brought it back into the laundry room later where my mom would iron the sheets on a “mangle.” I usually mowed one afternoon a week, a process that took several hours. When all of that was done, Gail and I were free to swim or play with kids who were staying at the court. For a couple of years I also managed the soda machines and learned to be a successful merchant in my own right. My dad owned and operated a DX gas station (remember DX?) in Noel during those years, leaving much of the cabin business to the rest of us.

We had two sets of seasonal neighbors who had summer cabins next to the court. Bill and Olive Bledsoe from Tulsa and her sister, Mabel Rainey, from Fayetteville, AR, were there most summer weekends, as were Charlie and Maureen Legg and their daughter, Jonne Sue, from Webb City, MO. Gail and I spent lots of time with them and always hated to see the summer end and the neighborhood become quiet again. Jonne Sue taught us to play pinochle, an activity that I carried on into my college and army years. Her fat Chihuahua, Tinkerbelle, would roam around our feet looking for scraps of food while we played endless hours of cards.

Our neighbors, primarily Olive and Mabel, also managed to get us hooked on the soap opera, “As the World Turns”, which aired weekdays at 12:30 p.m., usually after the cabins were cleaned, but before time to do the laundry. I would make grilled cheese sandwiches, and then Mom and Gail and I would settle back with our meal to wallow in the fictional lives of the Hughes family. Gail and I were at school that fall day in 1963 when Mom’s show was interrupted by Walter Cronkite with the news that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.

Riverview was on the side of a hill with a trail and steps leading down to the river. We were on the muddy side of the river, but my dad built a small dock where three or four aluminum flat-bottomed boats were kept for customers so they could paddle across to the nice gravel bar on the opposite shore. It was also relatively easy to jump off of the dock and swim to the other shore, or float across on inner-tubes. Gail and I both learned to swim while we lived there. I spent many happy hours catching sun perch, letting them go, and often hooking the same ones again. I also liked to quietly sneak up on turtles sunning on logs, and then jump out of the boat and try to catch them as they frantically swam to safety. Water moccasins were plentiful too, but I usually make enough commotion stomping through the water that they gave me a wide berth.

A friend gave me four Muscovy ducks while we lived on the river, two drakes and two hens. That fall they were joined by three mallard hens who cottoned to the idea of just waddling up and enjoying the corn chops that I left on the bank each morning and evening. After a year or so, all of the ducks disappeared except for one of the mallard hens. She stayed on a couple of more years, and even laid two nests of eggs. The first nest was washed away in a flood. The second time Mama Duck nested farther up the hill behind the cabins, but a snake or some other critter managed to destroy that effort. She eventually became tame enough to walk the long hill to our yard where she would quack for her supper. After eating, often out of my hand, she would take flight and go back to the river. To this day I find that animals are often more comforting to be around than people. (Someday soon I will post about my little farm in the Ozarks, Rock’s Roost.)

My best memories of those years at Riverview involve sitting outside on the warm summer evenings and visiting and playing with the kids who would stay there while on vacation. We always looked forward to Nancy and Jimmy Hurn and their parents from Henrietta, Texas, arriving each August for one or two weeks. Their vacation often felt as though it was also our own vacation as well. (Kids who worked all summer in the tourist industry never got to go on vacation, so our best bet was to glom onto someone else’s!) The Hurn’s cousin, Danny, from Wichita Falls, Texas, was a regular as well – and there were many others who were important to Gail and me, but too many summers have passed for me to come up with their names.

Living on the river and having the opportunity to interact with people from a variety of areas and backgrounds was a wonderful experience. Yes, it was hard work, but it was also fun, and exciting, and educational – and I am a better person today for having grown up there.