1963: "Are You Trying To Look Like A Beatle?"

     The following is something that happened to me several months before The Beatles “hit” North America and appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show.

            One Sunday morning in November of 1963, I was sitting in the back pew at Salem Methodist Church with my friend Jary.  We had the job of being ushers during the service, and one of the perks of the job was that we could sit at the very back of church, away from our families, and be on our own, which gave us a little more freedom.  It allowed us to quietly talk during the boring sermons.

      I was just about to turn 16, and Jary, who was older, was a grade ahead of me.  I admired Jary because he was the most “intellectual” of my group of friends.  His range of knowledge was vasty superior to any of the rest of us. 

            As we sat there, I was playing with one of the little pencils I had taken from the pencil holder on the back of the pew in front of me, and was doodling on the margins of the church bulletin.  Jary bent over close to my ear, and asked me in a low voice, “Are you trying to look like a Beatle?”

    At the time, I didn’t understand the question.  It didn’t make any sense at all to me.  How could I look like a beetle?

With a confused look on my face, I inquired as to what he was talking about, and he explained that there was this new singing group from England who had long hair combed down on their foreheads, that were called “The Beatles”. 

    Naturally, to discover that I reminded Jary of someone else filled me with an immense amount of curiosity, so I was eager to find out more.   I told him I had never heard of them and asked him to explain.  He then told me there had been photo and a little article in Newsweek magazine and  said he would cut it out for me, so I could see the picture.

    Since I had never cracked a cover of Newsweek magazine, I had totally missed the event.  Jary was true to is word, because the next morning, when he sat down beside me on the school bus, he reached into his back pocket, pulled out his wallet from which he took a small piece of folded paper.  He handed it to me and when I opened it, I saw that it was a narrow horizontal photo of these mop-topped lads from England.  I thought they looked pretty neat.

    The photo peaked my interest in the Beatles even more and I was determined to seek more information.  During my lunch hour at school, I went into the school library where they kept copies of Newsweek magazines and looked through the most recent copies until I came upon the November 18, 1963 article entitled “Beatlemania”.

           Gleaning what I could from the article, I wasn’t sure if I would like their music--the article was fairly negative and described Beatle songs as “one of the most persistent noises heard over England since the air-raid shelters were dismantled,” and “high-pitched, loud beyond reason, and stupefyingly  repetitive.”--not exactly a glowing review,  but I sure did like the way they wore their hair.

    My hair was already heading in that direction, with my hair coming down across my forehead.  Mine was longer than most males, but there was an immense difference in the length of their hair and the length of mine,  but even my mini-version was already beyond what was normally seen on males in Southern Indiana, and long enough for Jary to notice.

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