It was a Lifetime Ago

I was living in Lefrak City, a crappy apartment complex in Queens. I was married to someone else. I was not yet a father. I was working in book publishing, working in sales, and the notion of making a full time living as a writer had not yet entered my mind.

I had the radio on and I heard that John Lennon had been shot. I was sure that he would be okay. It couldn’t end that way. Not at the hands of some random lunatic. Several hours later, I found out I was wrong.

PAD

19 comments on “It was a Lifetime Ago

  1. I was sitting, typing a remembrance for my APAs of my grandfather, from whose viewing at the funeral home i had just returned, when i looked up from the typewriter.
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    In those days, Marietta Cable put the UPI Telex newsfeed on a text crawl on the screen on one of their channels, and i usually had that on when i was working on anything in the typewriter that sat on a table in the living room.
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    It told me John Lennon had been shot.
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    Not a good week.
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    …and i thought (maybe not right then, but not long after) “And i thought that Altamont and Kent State were the end of an era…”

  2. I was six months old.
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    Sorry, I guess no one cares about my age. However, following up on Mike Weber’s “end of an era” call, I find it interesting, while working with 18/19 year olds here in NC, that 9/11 doesn’t really mean anything to them. It led me to realize that event is the same to them as when the Challenger exploded when I was around their age (though that was a far different kind of disaster, with a far different political response, especially considering those their age are joining the military to fight in a ‘global war on terror’ that began before they were really socially aware).
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    What is nice to know is that John Lennon hasn’t been forgotten, and people my age and younger, though not as many as those in his day, know of him and his (and The Beatles’) contributions to culture.

  3. I was in eighth grade, taking a shower and listening to the radio. Although I liked the Beatles, I hadn’t recognized the impact of their music and only later learned of Lennon’s wonderful solo material (excepting Imagine, of course). I thought of my sister, who loved Lennon.

  4. I will never forget having the news broke to me by Howard Cosell while watching Monday Night Football. Couldn’t tell you who was playing but it seemed really weird at the time listening to Howard describe the loss “of a great, great man.”

  5. I was just about to turn off the 11 p.m. news when I heard John Lennon had been shot. I was concerned, but there was no announcement of how badly wounded he was. I turned off the TV, crossed the living room to the bedroom, and turned on my radio and heard that he was dead. A friend whom I hadn’t spoken to in years (we just drifted apart), called me and we talked for hours.

    I went in to work the next day (CBS News, at the time) and was promptly sent home in a cab to bring in my Beatles collection so they could film it. (I don’t think it made air, however.) It was the most bizarre feeling: to be working in an exciting atmosphere bringing a show together to air that night and dying inside all the while.

    The only problem with the show, I felt, was they called it ‘The Dream Is Over,” while I felt then and still feel it is not. As long as we remember, John (and the other Beatles, will live on.

  6. I remember decorating the Christmas tree when the news came. I was only nine and didn’t even really know who Lennon was.
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    I happened on gun writer Massad Ayoob’s blog about the day over at http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2010/12/08/remembering-john-lennon/#comments
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    Mas was on the scene before the blood had dried as the feature editor for a magazine printed for NYPD union members. I found the last paragraph very teling:
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    “Say what you will about his politics, the cops saw John Lennon as a good man at heart. At a time when the city was too cheap to buy body armor for its police, the union had started a “vest fund,” and John Lennon had made a five-figure contribution. The cops knew it and appreciated it. In the days and weeks that followed, until it was certain that the killer had acted alone, Yoko Ono and Sean had free bodyguard service from a rotating crew of volunteer off-duty police.”

  7. I didn’t hear until the next morning. The TV was on but I wasn’t paying attention. Then I heard In My Life playing, and I rushed in to see the TV, because I was always thrilled to hear the Beatles on TV. We noticed they were showing pictures of John and then my brother asked if he’d died or something. When the song ended, it said ‘John Lennon 1940-1980’, and we knew that he had.
    I think it was the CBS Morning News with Charles Kuralt, because that’s what we usually had on back then.
    I didn’t find out how he’d died until I got to school and some other kids were talking about it.

  8. What I remember is that so many in the establishment hated his guts. Hated that he called them on their hypocrisy. Hated that he was pro-peace and pro-love but not necessarily pro-religion.
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    Too often, we only appreciate the great men when they’re gone. At least there were many who appreciated him while he was alive.

  9. I was in sixth grade, and culturally oblivious enough that I didn’t really think about the import of John’s death. In hindsight, of course, it’s huge.
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    My first real “where were you when” moment was Challenger in ’86 … but I don’t want to hijack the thread.
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    TWL

  10. I was in the final year at school, and woke up at 7 am to the sound of Radio 1 starting. Normally there would be a song at the start, but this time the DJ (Dave Lee Travis) just said something like “This is Radio One, and we go straight to the news.” The next thing I heard was that John Lennon had died, and I was awake in an instant. After a short bulletin, they went into a sequence of playing Imagine, (Just like) Staring Over and Give Peace A Chance.

    It was a surreal feeling in our common room that day – all of us had grown up with the Beatles in the background, and their music in the seventies as well. On the wall we had the Abbey Road poster, and one person had put a big “X” through Lenon’s face. Whoever did it was a jerk, and they were made to know it – by the end of the day, it had been replaced with a new copy.

    His death was shocking, but his talent and his music lives on.

  11. I was in college, running through stations on the radio and heard some Beatles and stopped. They played the entire Abbey Road second side, the medley, and right as the words “And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make” the DJ just said “John Lennon, dead from gunshots in New York”. A real gut punch.

  12. I was coming out of a Springsteen concert at Philly’s old Spectrum when I heard somebody say something about one of the Beatles. It was on the street after the trip back to Center City that we found out he’d been shot and was dead. I fell apart. I remember bawling like a baby and kicking over a newspaper kiosk. We were up all night. I was inconsolable. The next day it rained and rained—and The Beatles played… everywhere. Everywhere you went–their music filled the air, the streets. I remember sitting on a window ledge outside PCA and listening to “Hide Your Love Away” as it just filled the streets and gray gray sky.

    That night at the Spectrum- we wanted Bruce to sum it all up for us–to say something that would make sense of the pain. He opened his show by speaking softly to the crowd—“…it’s a hard thing to come out here and play tonight….” I don’t remember the next line. but then he started singing “…well shake it up baby, now…” and the crowd exploded in unison…. “Twist and Shout..”
    I’ll never forget it. He rocked with an intensity I’ve never seen before or since, by anybody.And every song seemed to be about John. Listening to Bruce, we knew that life would go on, but that something grand had been lost, that tribute must be paid…and that were forever marked.

  13. I was 23, living in Memphis. I wasn’t a fan of John’s; I felt that he’d lost something when he hooked up with Yoko, and while he’d done some things that I liked, a lot of the exuberance was gone. But hey, maybe he’ll recapture it… and then the anchor on the NBC local news said he’d been killed. I switched channels. CBS. ABC. Same news. I finished my coffee and went to tell Mom. I wish I could say I cried, but I didn’t. I was too numb for that.

  14. I was 20 years old and living in Northern California. My parents and younger brother were downstairs watching Monday Night Football; since I had no interest in sports (and still don’t) I was upstairs watching WKRP In Cincinnati. I no longer recall what episode of the show it was at all; the only thing I remember is that my mom came upstairs to tell me the news about Lennon’s murder.

    I had loved the music of the Beatles ever since I was a little kid, and I think I went into a state of shock, because I don’t remember a single other thing about that day or night. I recall feeling numbed or shell-shocked the next day at work, as were most of my co-workers. The rest of that period is just gone.

    I could say the same things that so many others are saying about how it ended their innocence about the world, but I’m afraid it would sound trite or cliched. It was just hard. That’s all.

  15. On a lighter note, I’m always relieved that Lennon is remembered more for his life than his death. I’m sure a lot of people just thought he retired and dissappeared, not died.

    And I really love it that he became a New Yorker. Unfortunately, that made it easier to get to him.

    Dave

  16. I was attending Drexel University studying for my mid-term exams in one of the lounges of the dormitory that I lived in when one of my neighbors said in a stunned voice “John Lennon was shot!” Thinking it was a probably a bad joke, I dismissed it. When I finished studying, I went to the main recreation lounge and watched the evening news to see if it was true. This prompted a series of more interesting conversations among the foreign students than the American students who watched it. An Israeli student that I talked to said that it reminded him of Kennedy’s assassination decades earlier! While John Lennon wasn’t an elected official nor an appointed diplomat, he left as big a mark on the world as any statesman IMHO.

  17. I had just been born a few hours prior. Years before I had any firm grasp on who the Beatles were, my dad was helpfully informing me that I had murdered one of them.

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