Adding Video

I first saw the Beatles when they appeared on Ed Sullivan. It was all that my friends could talk about that week. My parents weren't all that interested in the show, so I watched it myself, and discussed it the next day with my friends at school.

I decided that Paul McCartney was my favorite Beatle. He and my mother shared the same birthday, is it was obviously meant to be.

I didn't see them at their concerts in Cleveland, OH. The first was September, 1964. The concert got stopped part-way through, as the police were concerned that the crowd was getting too rowdy. A description of the event is here.

54 years ago, on August 14, 1966, the Beatles played Cleveland for one last time, in the old Cleveland Municipal Stadium. I didn't see that concert, either. At that time, I would have been 15. The cheap tickets were $3.00. That was almost a month's worth of allowance for me, in those days. So, out of my price range, even if I could persuade my parents to OK the event (unlikely - very unlikely).

My mother worked as a shoe sales clerk at that time. She made, as I remember, $1.25/hour. So, that would have been around 3 hours of work (after taxes). We needed the money to pay bills. We kids generally didn't ask for things that were out of our family's budget limits. We knew the value of a dollar, and kept our wants to reasonable limits.