My recollection of coming in that cold Tuesday December morning, after Mom and I had finished up our morning newspaper route, was to find my dad waiting for us as we came in.
It was not entirely unusual for my father to greet us as we came back from the morning newspaper rounds, because he loved to read the paper first thing in the morning. Being the “paper boy” for a small Indiana farming town meant that my dad usually had to wait before we got back delivering everyone else’s paper first before he could get his hands on one.
Normally, dad stayed up half the night — the perennial night owl. For some reason, he seemed more disheveled than usual.
“John Lennon’s been shot,” he said, or words to that effect — after 30 years, quite honestly, I really don’t remember the exact turn of phrase he chose, but I remembered he delivered it with a certain resignation, a certain matter-of-fact sadness to his voice.
Out delivering the paper in the frosty Indiana morning, my mother and I had no idea of what had happened. While we sometimes listened to the radio during our seven mile route, this particular morning we spent the time laughing and chatting away the hour or so it took to get the papers out to our customers. And because John Lennon had been killed late on a Monday night, there was nary a word nor a peep about it in the paper we delivered that Tuesday morning. I’m sure that by the time the 5 star edition of the Indianapolis Star had rolled off the press — the last print run of the night — and thrown into the back of the eagerly awaiting delivery trucks, the news of Lennon’s death had come too late for the powers that be to do anything about it.
So there was that fairly awkward moment of realizing that you’ve been enjoying yourself while something tragic is unraveling around you, made all the more poignant by realizing that you weren’t even aware of it.
He had apparently been up half the night, at least — my father — listening to whatever news reports he could get off of the few TV channels we got in those days — long before any of us had 24/7 coverage on CNN. My mother always said that my dad’s love of the news had come from being a history major in college. History unfolding in front of his very eyes, was I think the way she put it once.
But it touched me deeply that he cared enough to tell me. That he cared enough to wait up for me as we came back from our rounds.
Make no mistake about it. My father was not of the “Rock and Roll” generation. He particularly loathed Elvis, whom he tended to ridicule whenever the subject came up. I never really got a bead on exactly what my father thought of the Beatles, but if I had to guess, they probably wouldn’t have registered very high in his book. And even though my father was a student of history, I don’t know if any of John’s exploits — good or bad — registered on him or not. I really don’t know, in retrospect, what exactly my father knew of or thought about John Lennon, but it touched me deeply that he cared enough to stay up and let me know. To share a moment of senseless, tragic loss, that touched us, and the whole world around us simultaneously.
I remember seeing a bit of documentary footage recently, where John and Yoko tried, in vain, to patiently explain to a newspaper reporter their campaign for peace, and for ending the Vietnam War. The reporter, quite clearly, made it obvious that she thought they were stark raving mad. And patiently, without getting too angry, John explaining by saying that “if we save just one life, it will have been worth every penny.” Just one life…. Just one life….
My father, a Presbyterian minister, was himself a man of peace, and the types of musicians that were revered and respected in my house growing up were folks like Pete Seeger. Maybe deep down my father somehow knew that John Lennon was also a man of peace. I can’t really say now. There’s probably no one who would remember, and my father has long since passed on himself. And when I heard, earlier this fall, that Pete Seeger would be singing in Central Park to celebrate what would have been John’s 70th birthday, something touched me inside, as if to let me know that it had finally come about full circle. I’d like to think that perhaps my father was somewhere nearby, singing along and perhaps enjoying the beautiful fall day.
But all I can tell you for sure is that after 30 years, it still hurts. And I never quite felt the same about my father since that day, for being moved enough to wait up until dawn that crisp and deathly cold Indiana morning, so he could tell me in person that John Lennon had been shot last night.
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