In 1963, with two friends, we deejayed all our Wooster High School school dances. This was back when deejays simply played (vinyl) records for dances instead of the hip-hop deejays who now exist.
Doing dances caused me to become a sort of "star" among my fellow high school students. Even though I was a fat guy and didn't qualify to be a football player, some kids liked me because I knew everything about rock and roll music. In fact, I was also the first one at my high school to introduce The Beatles to my fellow students.
“The Beatles?” asked Karen Doty. “What’s that?”
“They’re this great rock band from England,” I said.
Although 1963 was a breakout year for the band in England and Europe, few Americans had ever heard of the Beatles. Ed Sullivan happened to be in London when the Beatles were mobbed by throngs of young girls at a rainy Heathrow Airport in 1963. He was stunned by their enthusiasm and booked the group on his variety show for three dates in February 1964.
“How do you know about them?” Steve Ellis asked.
I told him, “A US disc jockey got a British flight attendant to buy him a copy of I Want to Hold Your Hand, and he started playing it. It became the Beatles' first number one record in America in Feb. 1, 1964.”
On the evening of February 9, Ed Sullivan looked like a genius for having hired the world’s most popular band for his show. Their presence on Sullivan’s show that night, attracted an audience estimated to be seventy-four million people, the largest audience in American television history at the time.
For The Beatles, 1964 turned out great. Nineteen Beatle songs made it into the Billboard top 100 singles list that year.
