December 14,2005

Hi Everyone:

Just want to say hi and hope you are all having a good holiday season. As you all know I haven't had
much time to write, but I couldn't let December 8th go by without writing about John Lennon. I know it's
December 14th, but well just read it OK?

Have a Great Day
Billy G

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    Last week, on the 25th anniversary of his murder, people everywhere were telling their stories about
John Lennon. Well, here's mine.
       Us catholic school kids remember that we usually had December 8 off in observance of the Feast
of the Immaculate Conception. On December 8, 1981, my best friend at the time Peter Esposito, was
going out to lunch with his grandmother, Mrs. Bowen and her best friend "Aunt May" McArdle. Mrs.
Bowen invited me along. We were going to the Cadillac Restaurant on Queens Boulevard.(which became
Farel O'Toole's, which has since been knocked down. Three houses now stand on the property)
       I don't remember much about the lunch, except when Mrs. Bowen mentioned that it was the
anniversary of the murder of John Lennon. Aunt May shook her head and said "You know, I don't know
why they made such a fuss over him."
Finally, someone who was asking the same question I was.
       On December 9th 1980, I was watching the Six o'clock news with my parents. Back in those days,
there was no Five o'clock news and the news at 6 went for an hour. Roger Grimsby and Bill Beutel were
doing the newscast on Channel 7,  and they led with John Lennon's death. It was the first I had heard of
it. Actually I had never even heard of John Lennon. I knew who the Beatles were, but not individually. I
had only first heard of Paul McCartney after he was arrested in Japan for marijuana possession earlier
that year.
      There were two news stories that had dominated 1980. The hostage crisis in Iran, and the Presidential
Election going on that year. Now, all of the sudden, they were talking about John Lennon being shot and
killed outside his apartment in Manhattan.
And talking about it
and talking about it
and talking about it.
      Finally at around 6:30 or so, Beutel said that both President Carter and President-elect Ronald
Reagan had expressed their sadness over the death of John Lennon.." That's when I was like "Whoa!"
    Even the President had something to say about this? To me it was just a famous person who died.
Yes, he was young (though when you are 7 years old, 40 doesn't seem that young) and yes it was tragic
that he was shot, but people were getting shot all the time, especially in New York, but all over the place
as well.
    Indeed, just under 4 months later, President Reagan would be shot in Washington, and 2 months after
that, Pope John Paul II was shot in Rome. And that coverage I understood. That was country and God
being attacked. John Lennon was a musician. And coverage of his murder went on for days.
       I should also note this was around the time I had started getting into the Presidents. That summer I'd
gotten a book out of the library in Rockaway about the Presidents and read it over and over again. By
the time of Lennon's death, I could name all 39 Presidents, amazing all my parents friends. It was the
beginning of my reputation of having my brain filled with utterly useless information.
      So any news story not dealing with either Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan was one that I didn't care
about. And yet the names, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Mark David Chapman would dominate the
papers and newscasts for most of December into the new year. Only the release of the hostages and the
inauguration of Reagan (both on January 20th, 1981) put Lennon on the backburner.
      But now, one year later in December 1981, it was starting up again. And it was at the old Cadillac
Restaurant on Queens Boulevard, where someone else, besides me, was wondering what the big deal
was.
      The mistake I made, unfortunately, was posing that question to my mother upon my return from lunch
that afternoon. My mom, was a teenager at the height of Beatlemania, one of the millions of girls
watching Ed Sullivan on February 9, 1964, when they made their US television debut. She was, like most
of our mom's who are around the same age, a huge fan.
     And like most of our moms she took Lennon's death pretty hard. Except I really didn't know that.
Until I asked the same question old Aunt May asked at the Cadillac.
      It wasn't so much what she said that day, as the way she said it. It was something along the lines of
"Because he was an important part of alot of peoples lives...." But she said in a very firm, very strong
way. I had obviously struck a nerve. For a while after that, I referred all questions about music to my
father.
     It really wasn't until years later, when I started reading books about Lennon and the Beatles with the
same fervor that I read books about the Presidents back when I was 7 or 8, that I understood what the
big deal was. When the Beatles arrived in New York for the first time, it was just months after JFK was
assassinated, and the country was in a serious gloom. The Beatles seemed to wake the US up from that
gloom. And while they were at it, they changed history. They changed how people dressed, how they
wore their hair, and they turned music into art. The world in 1970 was completely different from the one
that had been in 1960. The Beatles had a big say in causing all that.
       And Lennon himself had the biggest loudest voice of them all. He was one of the first rock and roll
musicians who understood that things that he said could impact the world. And whether it was speaking
out in favor of peace, or against poverty and racism, he had a huge following.
    And when he died, everyone who had either watched him on Ed Sullivan, or heard him proclaim All
You Need is Love, or rallied behind him as he urged the world to Give Peace a Chance, felt a piece of
them die too. And I at 8 years old, and Aunt May who was probably pushing 75 at the time, were too
young and too old respectively, to realize that.
    Looking back, I'm sure I've blown my mom's reaction out of proportion. I was probably being a know-
it-all, and I just didn't expect her to have that connection.
    Tara and I went to Strawberry Fields last Thursday night and if I had asked some of those people what
the big deal was, the non-violence they preach there may have come to an abrupt end. But all you had to
do was look around at the mass of people of all ages, and you didn't have to ask.
You just know.