Where would John Lennon be on the events of the last forty years if he were alive today, at 80? Where would he be on Covid-19, the masks, the vaccines? Where would he be on the reason for this blog, the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks? He is still alive in many people’s hearts and minds, mostly as a mainstay of the Beatles, secondarily as a post-Beatles personality and performer, husband of Yoko Ono.

Some Sunday newspapers are highlighting the anniversary of his death this coming Tuesday, Dec. 8. One of the tributes (the only one I’ve seen) is THIS ONE* by Ray Kelly, who remembers the day of Lennon’s being gunned down. There have to be millions of personal recollections of acute loss around the world. Most of them won’t be written down. Here’s mine:

I don’t remember where I was or what I was doing when I heard the devastating news. Lennon was not a big hero of mine, just someone I took for granted as key to my favorite band. I had returned to the United States in September after a year working in a country where English was not the primary language (but where people liked to try their English out on me), so I wasn’t up on his latest antics and songs. But I knew by heart most of the songs he had written or co-written and performed with John, George and Ringo. I have all their albums (although I rarely play them) and none of his. 

What I do remember is leaving the newsroom that evening with a colleague (who now makes a bit of money singing songs, some of them her own, while playing acoustic guitar), and walking several blocks down North Street in Pittsfield to Sammy Vincent’s, which was closed. They must have had a display in the window with photos and albums including him. No music though. We just stood there mourning. Saying nothing.

It was cold and dark and snowing, with slush underfoot. I felt as low as one can feel. Completely de-energized. Miserable.

Some of what grabbed me about Kelly’s tribute, HERE AGAIN, was that although he was much more deeply into the Beatles and Lennon than I and would continue to be so, we shared a few other things. Among of their things, “radio splits.” These were short summaries of news service stories. At the Springfield Union, Kelly gathered them early in the morning from either the AP or the UPI machine, or both. At the Hartford UPI bureau a few years before, it had been one of my tasks on the overnight shift to boil down longer Connecticut stories into all-caps radio splits for news announcers to “rip and read.” 

That probably still happens today although, especially in the Covid era, someone properly equipped can do it without leaving home. And the news announcers probably won’t use anything else not produced by their own organization’s reporters.

What would Lennon say about that? We’ll never know.

— Mark Channing Miller

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* I read Kelly’s remisissance in the traditional newsprint Sunday Republican, which unlike the online version has a black-and-white head-and-shoulders portrait of Lennon looking right into the camera, looking serious, taken a few days before his assassination. His hair is fairly closely cropped, and he’s not performing. He could be a truck (lorry) driver, or a reporter. Another black-and-white photo, as wide as the page, shows some of the estimated 50,000 to 100,000 people gathered outside the apartment where John and Ono had lived, after attending the memorial service for him the bandshell at Central Park.