Imprints

The Ones Beatles show began with three questions for the Roy Thomson audience:

Where were you when John F. Kennedy was shot?
Where were you when man first landed on the moon?
Where were you when the Beatles played the Ed Sullivan show for the first time?

November 22, 1963. I have no clue, the tragedy not registering for at least another decade.
July 20, 1969, 10:56 pm. I was asleep on the floor in front of the television. My parents had allowed us to stay up to witness the historic event except I could not keep my eyes open, relying on replays on the CBC news in the following days.

However, images of the Ed Sullivan show which aired February 9, 1964 flash into my head, the four lads from Liverpool, live, barely heard above the din of screaming fans. I would have been only 3 years, 9 months, most likely in bed, an improbability that I could remember anything from such a young age. Yet, the visual persists. Was the memory a function of repeated broadcasts years later? Did we own a television given that my parents took out two mortgages to buy the house on Kostis Avenue? My mother had always been a woman fascinated with gadgets, interested in acquiring the latest, particularly in appliances. The infancy of mass television programming would have been the experience she craved as a stay-at-home mother of three boys under four, the proof of succeeding in a new land, what her siblings back in the Netherlands would not have owned.

As the program proceeded, nostalgia overwhelmed me. The band performed, in order, the songs of the Beatles which reached Number One on the American Billboard Hot 100. Photographs displayed on the screen accompanied the note-for-note rendition beginning with “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” which vaulted to the top spot on February 1, 1964, remaining there for seven weeks. I recall the song being a favourite for Mom.

I could hear her voice singing to each subsequent hit.

She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah
She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah

Say you don’t need no diamond rings and I’ll be satisfied
Tell me that you want the kind of things money just can’t buy.

When I’m home everything seems to be right,
When I’m home feeling you holding me tight.

Baby says she’s mine, you know
She tells me all the time, you know
She said so
I’m in love with her and I feel fine

Hope you need my love babe,
Just like I need you.
Hold me, love me, hold me, love me.

After 1966, it was time for intermission. Her voice continued to play in my mind. We have a tendency to forget our parents were young once. Mom listened to the radio, and she loved to sing out loud to the latest, and the Beatles were the band of the 60s. I don’t recall her being as fond of their studio albums from 1967 onwards. Those songs I eventually discovered on my own.

It was her recitation of the words while engaging in the necessary tasks of parenting, focusing on the lyrics of love, of family, of home, that evoked the memory of that historic Ed Sullivan show.

I watched it, I remembered it, through my mother’s voice.