Welcome to HickoryRecord.com. Skip directly to: our Keyword Search, Section Navigation, Content.

HickoryRecord.com - Hickory Daily Record

HomeNewsEntertainmentSportsLifestylesOpinionCommunityWeather Online Tools Jobs | Real Estate | Shopping | Classified

SuperBuzz

Meet the (fans of the) Beatles

Related Links

By Ragan Robinson | Hickory Daily Record

Published: February 4, 2009

Hickory - Charles McAteer

Charles McAteer had never seen anyone like The Beatles. He'd never heard a sound like theirs. He liked both.

It was the look that got him in trouble.

After those three Sundays of Beatles on Sullivan, McAteer bought every magazine and poster he could find featuring The Beatles. All that time looking at the mop-tops inspired him.

When he started his first year of high school at Fred T. Foard in 1965, McAteer was sporting his own "long" hair. He let his lock grow all summer, with little success.

"It was even on my ears," he said. "I just combed it down to my eyes."

Sometime around the first week of school, a teacher told him to report to the principal's office. When the principal told McAteer he would have to "get that stuff whacked or shaped or something," the teenager with the wannabe Beatles hair assumed he was joking.

Another week and he was back in the principal's office. This time, he was suspended, until he could come back looking more decent.

He was out for three days, listening to Beatles albums mostly, before his father insisted on a Saturday afternoon haircut. When McAteer and his mom came back from the barber, his father sent them back, saying it wasn't short enough.

The rules eventually got more lax and McAteer grew his hair back out, although never down to his ears while he was in high school.

"I'm brown and gray now," he said. "I've worn it long for 40-some years. And The Beatles are what caused it."

Pat Dietz

Pat Dietz figured The Beatles were worth a holiday or two. They were even worth getting caught.
Her family lived in New York, where the radio stations would tell fans what flight the Fab Four would arrive on and which hotel would house them.

Dietz, who was 16 in 1964, used to skip school with her younger sister and flock to the right airport or the hotel. Their mother was hip enough to get them tickets to a Beatles show at Forest Hills Stadium show in August of that year. She was not hip enough to condone her daughters as truants.

Dietz and her sister went to the airport when The Beatles were to arrive. Deterred by the crowds, they took their signs welcoming John and Paul, George and Ringo to the Delmonico Hotel in Manhattan.

They spent hours there, at the front of the crowd behind a police barricade, looking up at a window and screaming every time a curtain moved.

When their mom asked the next day how school had been, she was armed with a New York Post. There on the page, in her dark, rimmed, cat-eyed glasses, was Dietz, too enraptured with her view of the window to have noticed a newspaper photographer.

She tried to talk her way out of it with something like, "Wow! That girl looks just like me."

Her mom came back with, "And the girl beside you looks just like your sister."

When they promised never to do it again, the girls crossed their fingers.

A match made by The Beatles
You could call Ed Sullivan a matchmaker for Dietz and her husband, Doug. The met that night, after her mother invited the young man to come over and watch.

He was in the Navy and home on leave. She was a shy girl with a crush on Ringo. He held her hand while they watched.

The two have been together almost 39 years. They have three children and 13 grandchildren – and a collection of Beatles CDs.

Carlene Jackson

When The Beatles came on, so did the brake lights.

The car doors would fly open and Carlene Jackson would fly out in a cluster of coeds. The 1960s car speakers buzzed with "All My Loving" or "I Wanna Hold Your Hand." Jackson and crew did the Twist or the Funky Chicken on the dusty shoulder of a two-lane Virginia highway.

At stoplights they engaged in a silly stick-less limbo to celebrate the music that was a freedom song to Jackson, a college sophomore accustomed to hiding beneath a trench coat if she dared wear a pair of jeans on campus.

The boys who were allowed to have cars at school drove Jackson and her female classmates home on weekends. They memorized radio stations in the tiny Shenandoah Valley towns they passed through and kept two-way radios in case another driver in the caravan missed The Beatles tune on the dial. Any song by the Fab Four was reason enough to get out and dance.

Small town folks stared and scowled as they passed the roadside boogie, certain, Jackson said, this generation would be the ruin of America. Sometimes the Twisting added hours onto the trip home. Jackson was never in too big a hurry for The Beatles.

"You've got to remember, we weren't allowed to have anything so this was our freedom," she said.
"Radford ladies," as the women of Radford College, then the arm of Virginia Tech set aside for young women, were required to wear heels and pantyhose the kind with the seam up the back if they left the grounds. Girls couldn't have telephones in their rooms or locked doors. Freshmen in the dorms had to sign in every four hours.

Gentleman "callers" at the dorm could visit in the "parlor" only in coats and ties.

The Beatles met the dress code that February in 1964 when they strummed and shook their way into the parlor, where they were the only callers allowed as late as 8 p.m. on a Sunday.

The girls screamed that night and swooned as they headed to bed, their young hearts still pounding in four-four time.

Jackson could already feel the dance coming on.

Beverly Snowden Lampe

The Beatles are innocence for Beverly Snowden Lampe.
She loved them first when she was a pre-teen and they were shaking their floppy hair on the black and white Magnavox her parents kept on wrought iron stands.

She loved them when she was 13 and girls that age could ride the ferry from her Coronado, Calif. home to San Diego, when 18,000 fans was a crowd like no other.

She loved them when their mere footsteps caused her fellow concertgoers to pull up the grass and eat it or stuff it in their bras.

And she loved them when she was young enough to believe in fairy tales. Like the one she nurtured the night of that August 1965 concert in Balboa Stadium. A rumor went through the crowd that night at the show. The Beatles had stayed at the Hotel Del Coronado, within walking distance of Lampe's house.
As soon as they got back to Coronado, Lampe and her friends made their way to the hotel.

She spent the evening peeking like Alice in Wonderland into keyholes. In the little girl's voice that still comes out when she talks about The Beatles, she called, "John, Paul, George, Ringo. Please come out."

"In my heart of hearts, I truly thought The Beatles would come out. I really thought I would get to meet George."

The Beatles guitarist, George Harrison, was her first crush.

She sighs a little, even now, when she looks at his dreamy eyes in the picture that came with the "Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band" album.

Lampe still listens to the songs and she still tells the story of the night she spent searching for The Beatles.

"My youth comes back when I hear The Beatles and there's a spirit," she said. "I'm sure if God grants me a long life and I'm in my 90s when someone plays it in the rest home, I will get up and say, 'Let's dance.' And I'll probably tell my story of the Hotel Del Coronado and the night I thought I'd meet The Beatles."

Jane Burdecki

When Jane Burdecki thinks Beatles, the songs and the crushes and the concerts are tangled up in memories of childhood camaraderie, in the whirl of emotion that never burns as hot as it did the first time you felt it.

There were three girls in her group – Burdecki, Linda and Mike (yes, Mike). They weren't together the night of the Ed Sullivan Show but the phone lines must have been hot from all the calls, Burdecki said.
The girls were hooked. They formed their own Beatles "band," spending rainy afternoons in Linda's basement, belting out entire albums while they pretend-strummed cardboard guitars.

Their backyard playhouse was wallpapered with Beatles cards.

They used to wait at the neighborhood store for 16 Magazine to be delivered so they could gush over the newest pictures.

In 1964, the first time The Beatles came to nearby Cleveland, Ohio, Burdecki, then 11, got to see the show with her pals.

Her mom refused the request the next time The Beatles played Cleveland, in August 1966. But she still came away with memories.

The morning after the show, Burdecki and buddy Mike took a bus to downtown Cleveland and the Cleveland Sheraton. They crept into the elevator and took it to the penthouse, then tiptoed down a narrow hallway to the open doors.

Maids turned a blind eye to Burdecki and her friend, who walked all over the floor and touched the bedspreads, knowing The Beatles had been there, had touched the same things. Burdecki buries her face in her hands when she admits to sitting on the toilet.

They took the only objects they ever stole that day – two ashtrays from the room. The girls knew The Beatles smoked.

They used the ashtrays in their backyard hut for ashes of the Dave Clark Five cards they burned. To like The Beatles wannabes would have been like treason, they reckoned.

Burdecki keeps the ashtray in her house now, though she hardly knows anyone who smokes anymore.

She wonders if Mike still has hers and is resolved to find her the next time she goes back to Ohio, just so she can ask.

Gene Poole

Gene Poole, 57, is a drummer partly because of Ringo Starr and partly because of a girlfriend who had a crush on Ringo Starr.

The pictures that seared themselves into his memory from the 1964 Beatles performances on the Ed Sullivan Show were of the girls. They screamed and hollered and slung their heads.

"Those girls on TV, the girls around here, they all just went berserk," Poole said.

His parents shook their heads, too, while they sat in the living room to watch. They couldn't believe that long hair.

Poole already had an electric guitar by the first time he heard The Beatles. He would stand in front of a mirror with it and jump around, trying to look cool. But he confesses he was lazy and wouldn't practice.

Poole thought anybody could play the drums (he was wrong). And then there was the matter of young Vickie, who had a crush on Ringo. So he lobbied his dad for a set of drums.

In the year it took to convince his father, Poole would play potato chip cans and barrels. He and his friends would go into his grandmother's garage and try to play what they knew, about half of two songs, he said.

Vickie dropped him for another drummer not long after Poole got his first set. It was easier to give up the girl than it would have been to give up the sticks, he said.

"Forty some years later, I'm still trying to learn how to play 'em," he said.

Flossie Meyer

Flossie Meyer's family needed The Beatles. A transplant to Granite Falls from Wisconsin, Meyer comes from a long line of Democrats. Her mother worked on John F. Kennedy's campaign. Their house was full of Kennedy hats and pins and other paraphernalia.

The November 1963 assassination marked a somber time for the family. Nobody talked much for weeks afterward. Just sitting down to dinner seemed like a chore.

Fewer than three months later, America got a reason to sing again. The Beatles on Ed Sullivan marked the beginning of a rock 'n' roll legacy. Soon the top three songs in the nation belonged to these British upstarts. It signaled a change in pop culture and it revitalized the Meyer household.

"As a family, it was the first time we really felt happy again," Meyer said. "They just had this cheery energy and they really brought up the spirits."

Seven months after the landmark TV appearance, Meyer, her mother, three friends, a sister and a nephew were en route from Sheboygan, Wisc. to Milwaukee. They had good seats but they never heard a note. All they could make out was the screaming.

That single show plotted a course for Meyer, who became a lifelong fan. She's seen Paul McCartney several times since and caught a Ringo show at Milwaukee's famed Summerfest.

For years her Mustang's license plate said RBR Sol, for "Rubber Soul." It's the album with the "Drive My Car."

When George Harrison died in 2001, nearly 40 years after The Beatles revitalized her young life, Meyer packed away the newspaper article with her "I'm A Beatles Fan" pin, The Beatles nesting dolls and the other collectibles that help illustrate the story of her life.

Meyer misses Wisconsin. She's been her less than two years but has been back about six times. When her husband was looking for ways to make her feel more at home, he hung a Beatles print in the dining room.

It actually helped, Meyer said.