Last Anniversaries

Today is the 60th anniversary of the Beatles’ first performance on the Ed Sullivan Show.

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Even having been born many years after this television event – and truly it was a television event – it still loomed large in the lore of my parents’ generation. Two-and-a-half months earlier, President Kennedy had been assassinated, an event collective enough that everybody expects that if one lived through it, one would remember where they were or what they were doing when they heard the news. The Beatles’ first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show was something like this, except that there was little question about where people were – they were in front of their television sets. (Except for my mom. She said she was the only kid in her rural Iowa sixth-grade class who didn’t watch the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. And you wonder where my contrarian streak comes from! *L* Still, she remembers the event because it still was such a big deal.) 

I can only imagine. Even now, there’s something innately charming about the “lads from Liverpool”. I don’t know that anybody could hear the music, but I’d expect that some part of the insanity that arose from the Beatles’ first trip to America had to have been the sense that the period of mourning was finally over; that it still may be winter, but there was now the tangible promise of spring. The life that had been muted down now burst forth again with a vengeance. 

In this way, even though I was far too young to experience it myself, I understood that these experiences were part of the fabric of the generation before me, as much as things like the Columbine high school massacre and 9/11 would be for my generation. I suppose it’s not even just that these things happened, but each one of them caused the world to change. 

In the ’90s, I remember there being a lot of 50th anniversary commemorations for World War II. I didn’t understand it so well, because to a kid, fifty years seems like a long, long time ago. Yet they were all close enough then that there were thousands of people who were showing up to all these events. Again, I couldn’t imagine that there would be a time when that would no longer be. 

Then, in 2003, when I was living in Germany, I attended a couple of days’ worth of events connected with the 60th anniversary of the events surrounding the capture of the White Rose. There was an event in the auditorium of the university, and in the VIP section were a number of people who had personal connections to the White Rose. One of the women in attendance was Hertha Siebler-Probst, the widow of Christoph Probst. She was in her 80s and I was simultaneously amazed that she was still living and suddenly appreciative of how short a span of time sixty years is; that she was still living bore testimony to that. 

Hertha Siebler-Probst wasn’t the only survivor there, but most of the others belonged to a slightly younger group who weren’t in Munich in 1943. Yet, by the 2013 anniversary, all but one or two were gone. 

And so, with all the excitement about the 60th anniversary of the Beatles’ television appearance on Ed Sullivan, I also can’t help but feel a sadness. Sure, Paul and Ringo may live to see the 70th anniversary as well, but the generation for which this was a cultural milestone is rapidly passing away; as a kid, “everyone” remembered the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, these days, it’s incredibly weird that there are adults walking around who weren’t born when the World Trade Center in New York was still standing. 

Oddly, the Beatles’ “final release” seems to touch upon this melancholy . I wasn’t particularly a fan of the song the first time I heard it, but it’s growing on me. Now and Then – the ghosts of what was once and the inevitability of last anniversaries. 

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