John Lennon 1940-1980

[cinematixyz]

Today is a very sad and reflective day for a few of us here at cinematixyz. Most of us happen to be huge Beatle fans, especially Lennon, and today is the day we lost him all those years ago. I was in diapers. One of us was a young teenager. One wasn't even born yet. I am not even sure how the fourth member of OUR group feels about him but for at

Comments

[captainsblog]

I've told this story in my own journal several times, but it's always fitting on this day.

I joined the staff of the Cornell Daily Sun in the fall of my sophomore year, in 1978- putting me a year behind the whiz kids on the fast track from kindergarten who all went out for it as freshmen. On our first night as lowly staffers, Rody the editor gave us the tour of the cavernous newsroom of the era, little changed from the dance hall it had converted from in the 1940s.

Early on, we came to the wire room- where one of two AP teletype machines clicked away (the other always in reserve in case the paper jammed) and the UPI photo machine occasionally hummed its primoridal faxiness. Our job was to pull the paper a few times a night and bring it to the night editor's desk. And oh, Rody afterthought- tell the MANAGING editor immediately if you ever hear a bell go off in there. That's breaking news. But it never happens.

That night, my first night? It happened. Jimmy Carter had just brokered the Camp David peace accords. We went into Fuck-Scrap-Everything mode and, in that pre-CNN/Cable era, were among the first to know that the world had ever so slightly changed for the better.

I spent hundreds of nights under that dance hall roof over the following years- staffing, eventually learning to cover stories, to edit copy, to proofread, and in all those nights, that bell never went off.

Until this night in 1980. I have it in my head as a Sunday (my usual copy edit night), but it wasn't. It was a Monday, so I must've been turning in a story myself. The bell went off, and within minutes, a room full of hardened cynical twentysomethings was reduced to a mass of tears.

As was one younger one. We called her "the Rat," a riff on name rather than appearance, but she was the head of the fast-track-from-kindergarten freshmen that year and she'd already shown she wouldn't take shit from nobody. Rat probably cried the longest and loudest of all.

Again, we had the scoop among ourselves- until the radio stations started getting the word out and "Imagine" became the world's most overplayed and simultaneously underplayed song for about a week.

That's where I was. In a room with a bell. That used to stand for peace but suddenly didn't anymore.

[cinematixyz]

Thank You, that was lovely honey.

Zuzu