Beatles change Flint Michigan girl’s way of looking at life — dumps “Midge” doll

Beatles by Hallmark

The following is a first person account of the how the Beatles helped change not only our cultural horizons but also our way of thinking of ourselves and it all started 50 years ago Sunday February 9, to the day. The article is written by Ellen Jones, Director of Public Affairs at Lansing Community College. Her story is not dissimilar to other accounts of the impact of the Beatles on the American psyche.

All My Loving by Ellen Jones

I had just turned 11 years old, scoring a Midge doll – Barbie’s best friend – as my birthday gift one month earlier. I was clearly still playing with dolls even if they looked like women.

That began to change in a big way on a Sunday night in February 1964.

My entire family settled in for Ed Sullivan’s big show at our home in Flint– anticipated by millions since the Beatles stepped off the plane at JFK two days earlier - when the first chords of “All My Loving” swept the 1950s away. The value of pink pleated skirts, madras shorts and circle pins began to plummet.

We’d seen nothing like it. Their hair, short in comparison to later years, was a far cry from the neat close cuts favored by Dr. Kildare and Troy Donahue, even Elvis. Their suits, all alike, had no collars. They wore boots with chunky heels. But it was their sound that picked up on the estrogen and progesterone in my body and hung it in the air like a threat.

Ellen Jones

I saw the girls in Ed Sullivan’s audience screaming, and like a yawn, it caught on. I began to scream. My stepsisters took it up. I could feel alarm radiate from the sofa where my dad and stepmother sat.

By the end of the first set, I had chosen my Beatle. Paul. Doe-eyed, dark-haired smiling McCartney.

We had to sit through the torture of impressionist Frank Gorshin and singer Tessie O’Shea before the Beatles came back on stage. By the end of the show, I was spent, stretched out on the scratchy beige carpet in corduroy pants, cotton floral shirt and kneesocks.

The next morning I went to school and found out every girl in my class had watched the show too. Each, it seemed, had claimed their own Beatle, and those who’d selected Paul became my new competition – even the dorky girls with Troll doll hair sticking out of their purses.

Confidence, which had not been my strong suit for several years, returned to the narrow slice of brain I devoted to Beatles information, and in the competition among Beatlemaniacs, it was personal information that became the new currency.

Now when we stopped at Bowman Drugs on the way home from school, it wasn’t penny candy or fountain Cokes that we were after but the latest Beatle magazines that cropped up by the dozens following their U.S. invasion. I couldn’t afford to buy them so I stood there and read as much as I could before the store’s proprietor shooed me away. Eventually he hand wrote a sign and stuck it above the magazine rack, “No reading allowed. Please buy the magazine.” Even then, I learned to be sneaky, like taking a magazine and going to the greeting card department and pretending to be looking for a card with the magazine opened down by my side.

A “Babs” letter

I found a penpal in England from a column at the back of one of the magazines and wrote her. Babs lived in a working class section of Surrey outside of London and she was every bit as smitten as I was. She sent me long letters written in fountain pen on blue lined paper and enclosed articles from Beatles fan magazines.

Babs gave me the kind of ammunition I needed to secure my place as Paul’s number one fan. At Longfellow School, I leaned over to Jean and said, “Paul wears a 15 and ½ shirt.”

“How do you know that?” she asked.

I was smug. “Babs told me.”

It was a letter Babs sent me the following year that gave me my greatest edge. I collected the blue envelope from the mail and took it into the bathroom to read. As I carefully opened the end of the envelope, a small rectangle of paper flew out and floated through the air like a feather, landing face up on the pink shag rug near my bare toes. I bent forward and peered down, coming face to face with Paul McCartney. At least his real, true life signature in ballpoint pen.I ran out of the bathroom to show the world even Gerb, our milkman. Tomorrow how a Detroit kid grabs a camera and steps on-stage with the Beatles.