By Georgia Temple, Entertainment Editor
The Midland Reporter-Telegram

It was 40 years ago today the Beatles caught the U.S. in their sway. They've since gone in and out of style, but talk of them is bound to raise a smile. So may we introduce to you, the act you've known for all these years...

Feb. 7, 1964: The Beatles step onto U.S. soil at the newly named John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City. The country was recovering from the shock of a presidential assassination some 11 weeks before; some were still grieving the death in Dallas of the country's young president.

By February, it seemed certain the country would survive and might even be stronger than before. The timing was perfect for a coup.

Enter the boys -- as their manager Brian Epstein called them -- John Lennon, George Harrison, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney. They had youth, talent and charm and the desire to hold your hand.

What more could a young girl want in 1964? All their loving?

Thousands of fans waited in the cold at the airport, their screams drowning out the roar of the jet engines.

Midland civic leader Joan Baskin remembers what she thought when she saw the Beatles deplane in New York City -- "Get a haircut."

"They were sort of the people who made the transition to all that hair we suffered with through the '60s. Being a mother with two young children, their charm eluded me. I wasn't the right age for the Beatles."

Millions of young people were the age for a change.

However, in early December, two months before their arrival, hardly anyone in this country had heard of the group already causing a stir in their native England.

So where did the crowd come from?

On Dec. 10, 1963, Walter Cronkite ran a feature about the group on CBS News. The program had been superseded from its original date Nov. 22, 1963, by the assassination. The segment inspired a Washington disc jockey to get a copy of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" from England and play it on the air. On Dec. 26, Capitol Records released the song in the United States.

Within two weeks, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" sold more than 1 million copies, became the No. 1 single and created a desire among the nation's youth that hadn't been seen since 1956 and Elvis Presley. (The original swooning crowds belong to Frank Sinatra, but that was decades before the 1960s.)

"I came back from (Christmas) vacation my junior year in college, and all the kids at Lon Morris College (in Jacksonville) were saying 'The Beatles are coming. The Beatles are coming.' That was the first I'd ever heard of the Beatles," said former Midland College instructor Shannon Smyrl.

"We thought that they were bugs," recalled her mother, Frances Smyrl.

"Or a Volkswagen," her daughter quipped.

On Sunday, Feb. 9, 1964, around half of the country found out exactly what the Beatles were. That evening at 8 p.m. nearly 74 million Americans tuned into the Ed Sullivan Show.

"My parents said, 'Tom, you need to see this kooky act on the Ed Sullivan Show,'" recalled Tom Jones, director of the Museum of the Southwest, who was in the sixth grade at the time. "I was mesmerized. The first thing I wanted to do, of course, was comb my hair straight down on my forehead, which my parents would not allow."

A year or two later, when "the craze had hit and everybody was getting the bug," Jones said, "I traded somebody in school for a pair of Beatles boots -- they were so cool. If my parents knew I had them, they would not let me wear them. So, I kept them hidden in the drain pipe by the bus stop. When I'd go to wait for the bus, I'd get the manhole cover off, switch my shoes with the Beatles boots and go to school."

Mayor Mike Canon and his wife, Judy, also remember the Ed Sullivan Show that February evening in 1964.

"I thought, 'Oh, gosh, look at that long hair,'" said Judy Canon. "The hairdos fascinated me. And they were good -- their new songs and sounds. I really think that's the time they intrigued me the most."

"They were definitely different," Mike Canon said. "At that point, we were used to Elvis and Roy Orbison -- those kind of singers. And all of a sudden the Beatles came, and they changed everything."

Pamela Vaughn, on staff at the Museum of the Southwest, remembers "how insane" the performance was. She liked what she saw. "It was the look, the total package."

Cindi Mladenka, who also works at the Museum of the Southwest, remembers that night in 1964 clearly. "My father said, 'You've got to see this, and I went in, and there, on a black-and-white television, were four guys playing incredible music that I had never heard before. I like music a lot. So that really wowed me. From that point on that's all anybody wanted to listen to, and we wanted to emulate them. They were a legendary group that changed music forever."

Midland businessman Ed Klatt "couldn't hear" The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show "for all the women screaming. And I thought, 'Gosh, it would be nice if you could hear them. And I also remember the long hair. It was long hair then. And I thought, 'My goodness, are they really talented?'

"Just from the reaction of the crowd, I knew they were going to be big. They were always first with everything, and only later did I realize how talented they were. They were rock 'n' roll, but an orchestra could play their music."

The Klatt family was like many American families -- they watched the Ed Sullivan Show.

"I think just about everybody watched Ed," said Randy Sanders, who has a landscaping business here along with his older brother, Gregory Sanders. "You watched what your parents watched."

The Sanders brothers were 8 and 9 and a half when the Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. Like many others, they are not sure if they saw the original show or the clips that have been shown since. They do know they liked the music.

"They made some good stuff," said Gregory Sanders. "You could tell what they were singing about. In the '70s, Jimi Hendrix, Blue Oyster Cult and the Beatles -- their music went along with the lifestyle."

Physical therapist Rick Gordon was 9 years old when the Beatles performed on the Ed Sullivan show. "I thought they were cool. I liked them. My parents thought they had long hair. I remember going to the barber and getting my hair cut, and the barber said some kid came in wanting his hair cut like the Beatles, and he wouldn't do it."

Parents weren't as fond of the Beatles as their teenagers.

"They didn't make the impression on me I'm sure they did on your generation," said Jenna Welch, recalling how her daughter, now the first lady, reacted to the group. "I remember Laura liked them, and I had to listen to the Beatles records whether I wanted to or not."

Midland musician and teacher Darryl Knapp was only in the fourth grade when the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, yet his life felt their impact.

"I remember buying a black-and-white composite of activity shots of the Beatles that hit the stands at 50 cents when I was in the fourth grade," Knapp said. "They had candid shots of them and a little about each. I'd give anything to have that still. ... It seemed to be the instant craze of everybody. It was a phenomena that struck. I can remember in the fourth, fifth and sixth grades, everybody just going bonkers over them. ... There hasn't been quite another group like that."

Area golfer Ginny Smith, who grew up in the Dallas area, was 16 when the Beatles performed five songs -- "All My Loving," "I Saw Her Standing There," "She Loves You," "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "Till There Was You" -- on the Ed Sullivan Show.

"I was swooning over them then," said Ms. Smith, who attended the first Beatles concert in Dallas with seven of her friends. They waited overnight at the box office at Preston State Bank to buy their tickets. Smith had three older brothers who checked on them throughout the night. They also had a number of requests to purchase tickets and wound up buying 40.

The day of the concert, "There were thousands of people already there at 4 and 5 in the afternoon," said Smith, who sat on the second row. "One girl on the side of the road was sobbing because she had lost her ticket. They had evidentally been mobbed so bad, this was the first concert where they put them up in the air so people couldn't get to them. All you could hear was the screaming. The crying never stopped. The cameras flashing. It was just being there. Everybody knew their songs already. We sang and screamed out with them."

Former Midlander George Harrison Lambert V got even closer to the Beatles in 1965. He was assigned through a security service in San Francisco, Calif., to take the Beatles from a concert Aug. 31, 1965, at the Cow Palace to The Cabana hotel on El Camino Real in Palo Alto.

"We put them in a cattle truck and drove them there," said Lambert, who was in Midland on vacation. "The manager was not supposed to tell anybody, and he told his assistant. When we got there, there were thousands of teenagers along the road.

"They were not expecting us in a cattle truck, so we got them in safely. We stayed about 30 to 45 minutes (after getting the Beatles into the hotel and on the eighth floor), and I was kidding George Harrison about my name and his, and he said, 'Your name isn't worth as much as mine.' We had a laugh. They were good kids. They were still human. They didn't realize what they had going. They did, but it hadn't gone to their heads as it had with other celebrities I'd met."

Jose Zertuche of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce was 3 years old when the Beatles first came to the States. He didn't see them on television, but, he said, "I can't remember a time when I didn't know who they were. When I grew up, the Beatles were everywhere you looked, everything you heard. We've read so much about it and heard so much about it, it's almost like we were a part of it -- the picture of them coming off the plane. The girls screaming and fainting. I'm just sorry I missed out on it."

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Sources for this story include local interviews, several news services and Bruce Spizer's book "The Beatles Are Coming! The Birth of Beatlemania in America." This story ran in the Saturday, February 7, 2004, issue of the Midland Reporter-Telegram. Page 1.

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