PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — It was 60 years ago — Feb. 6, 1964 — when a Pan Am Clipper arrived at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, and four young Englishmen from Liverpool disembarked on what would be a special day in music history.
The Beatles were here to tour the United States and Canada. They were met with thousands of assembled fans, roaring “We want the Beatles! We want the Beatles!”
Two days after their initial arrival, they were live and perfect in the first of three consecutive Ed Sullivan Show appearances. The largest audience they had faced in Britain to date was 4,000 people. Now, all of a sudden, a television audience of 75 million people was watching them.
I saw the show with my mom. She loved them. My dad called them a menace to society. Little did I know, later that spring, I would be invited to travel with them on their tour for 56 live concerts.
The second Ed Sullivan appearance was in Miami Beach, which I saw days after their arrival at Miami Airport. Behind me, 5,000 teenagers were smashing through the glass at Terminal B.
George Harrison talked about the future, even at that time.
"You know, we'll last out as the Beatles as long as we can, and then we'll probably just go into something like recording, you know."
But Brian Epstein, their manager, thought they would last until the next century — and he was right, 60 years later.
"I never thought they would be anything less than the greatest stars in the world. And I mean that," he said.
The Beatles rock the City of Brotherly Love
On Aug. 30, 1964, we were in Atlantic City, the smallest city on their tour, where we screened their movie, “A Hard Day’s Night,” with them. John Lennon said watching it was painful.
“When you first see yourself on the big screen, you just watch yourself,” he told me. “You’re thinking, ‘Look at that ear! Look at my nose! Look at my hair!’ And each one of us did that, so by the end of the film, we didn’t know what happened and we hated it.”
I had never been to Philadelphia until I came with the Beatles. On Sept. 2, their Philly show was totally out of control. They seemed off tune. And with 12,000 young people jammed into Convention Hall at the Philadelphia Civic Center, the Beatles could not believe the crowd.
Almost everyone in the audience thought that one of Fab Four was singing to them. Paul McCartney said they really believed they were in love.
"I was supposed to recognize her immediately and fall in love with her, which didn't happen. Definitely didn't happen."
It was hard to hear with the tremendous excitement. The folding seats started collapsing and the audience rushed the stage. The Police Department had to be very careful. After all, these were kids running in the hallway.
For the Beatles, the fans were everything. The young audiences were cheerful and loving, but there were limits with adults. Ringo Starr once told me, “I’m not a piece of furniture, I’m a human being. I have feelings the same as anyone else. We all do."
There most ominous moment that night in Philadelphia came courtesy of Jeane Dixon, the famous American psychic and astrologer. She had predicted that we would crash later that night on the flight from Philadelphia to Indianapolis.
It never happened, but it was a white-knuckle flight all the way. And cheers abounded in the cabin when we landed.
'It's been fantastic'
There are so many memories from that time. A laugh was never far away. Some more pleasant highlights from our flights include Lennon putting ice cubes down my shirt, pillow fights late into the night and an emergency landing in Portland.
John Lennon and I became close. He did the weather report live on my Action News show in May 1975.
In 1969, he married Yoko Ono in Gibraltar. On their honeymoon in Amsterdam, I reached John during their bed-in for peace, where he proposed a new twist.
“Instead of smashing things up, the people just grow their hair as a form of protest,” he said. “There’s so many hairy people that they carry a continuous sign of their protest.”
The long hair look caught on, and so did the mania. Lennon always wanted people to know how badly they wanted to see their fans, but they were restricted.
“Usually, somebody comes up and says, ‘The police chief or so-and-so won’t let you go. Jump in here!’ And they drag us off before we even — sometimes we don’t even know fans are there at airports, because they drag us off so quickly.”
But my most poignant memory is from the end of their second tour.
“It’s been fantastic. We’ll probably never do another tour like it. It could never be the same as this one,” John said. “It’s just been, you know, probably something we’ll remember the rest of our days.”