Feb. 9, 1964

Sunday night was the 50th anniversary of the Beatles appearance on the Ed Sullivan show.

Fifty years ago, I was a freshman at Richmond Professional Institute, now VCU. On February 9, 1964, I packed into the front parlor of Founders Hall with most of the other girls in the dorm to watch the Ed Sullivan Show on the dorm's tiny black and white TV—one of only two TVs in the building. (Our housemother had the other one in her apartment next to the parlor.) The parlor hadn't been so crowded since we watched JFK's funeral a few months earlier.

The TV parlor was on the left side of the front door. You can see the parlor's windows in the above picture. Everybody had been talking about their appearance for days. We'd been listening to their music for a few months on WLEE, Richmond's biggest radio station. But we hadn't actually seen them. And then, there they were—live on TV and singing the songs we'd been listening to. https://youtu.be/jenWdylTtzs

I don't remember how we reacted. I don't think there was any screaming in the dorm. If we'd screamed, the housemother would likely have turned off the TV. We knew we were watching something important, but I don't think any of us realized how much the Beatles and their music would influence American culture in the years to come.

In 1964, girls still had a dorm curfew. We had to wear dresses or skirts to class. We typed our assignments on the heavy portable typewriters we'd lugged from home. We rolled our hair on big rollers and dried it under a hairdryer. We listened to music on records—black vinyl disks—that we played on our record players, or else we listened to our radios that weighed a couple of pounds each. Transistor radios were still a few years in the future, and tape players—? They were heavier than record players and used reel-to-reel tape. MP3 players, iPods, and iPads were beyond our comprehension then. Our world was pretty much black and white in those days.

This is how I looked when I attended RPI. I don't look like that anymore. My world is a lot more colorful—and filled with gizmos that I couldn't have imagined in 1964.

Sunday night, I lay on the sofa with a couple of cats asleep on me and watched the Grammy Salute: A Night That Changed America in color. I thought Paul looked old and tired, but Ringo seemed energetic and vivacious. I'm old and tired too. But I still like the Beatles' music.

Fifty years—where did the time go? Seems like only yesterday. . . .

~

January 1965

I’m not the only one who’s been going through boxes of family stuff lately.

Eileen Lawlor, who was my sophomore year roommate at RPI (Richmond Professional Institute, now VCU), was going through a box of her recently deceased mother’s things and found this picture from January 1965:


Yes, I am the thin person in the RPI nightshirt. Yes, that is a head-full of curlers I’m sporting under the frilly curler cap. Nancy Lewis, who I remember was an occupational therapy major, also has curlers. At night in Founders Hall dorm, almost every girl wore curlers.

You see, 1965 was still the dark ages—before hot curlers or electric curling irons. Our hair dryers were hat-boxed sized. We pounded manual typewriters that made a such racket people in nearby rooms couldn’t sleep. Our radios were the size of a shoebox. We listened to records that we played on a turntable. There was one phone at the end of the hall for a dozen or more girls to use. There was one black and white TV in the dorm parlor for a hundred of us to watch. The dorm wasn’t air-conditioned, but it had steam heat in winter. When the heat cut on, the racket drowned out the typewriters.

The school computer, used to make student schedules, was the size of a large room. I know, because I once worked during advance registration and had to carry punch cards from the registrar’s office to the computer people. Punch cards? Well, they were—aw, heck! They’re so out-dated no one needs to know.

Back in 1965, we didn’t dream that one day we’d have our own computers, cell phones, tiny devices that stored hours of music, curling irons, hair dryers that were the size of our hand, etc. E-mail didn't exist; we hand wrote letters. Life was simple then.

I'm glad personal computers were invented. Thanks to the Internet, I found two of my previous RPI roommates—Eileen who lives in Massachusets and Polly, my junior year roommate, who now lives in Newport News (Hi, Polly! I know you’re reading this blog!). I'd lost track of them for decades.

Eileen didn’t scan the picture and send it via email. She snail-mailed the actual picture inside a hand-written card.


Kind of like old times.

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