10,000 Kids go Wild over Bugs
By Larry Grove
The Dallas Morning News
September 19, 1964
The kids gave their hearts and their voices to the Beatles when the mopheads from Liverpool closed out their successful American tour Friday evening at Dallas Memorial Auditorium.
Noisy as it was -- warm as it was -- the thunderous reception may h ave set a sort of record for police behavior for a Beatle audience. The 10,000 kids squirmed. They squealed. They set up a shrill din that left the ears ringing.
Yaaaaaaaaah!
From the minute that the idols appeared on stage, camera flashbulbs gave the cavernous auditorium an eerie light and the noise was indescribable. Once they realized this was really the Beatles, ah joy, the kids did what was natural.
They went wild, wild, wild. But no one can say they didn't do it with grace.
Police took extraordinary precautions to prevent what could have been, with relative ease, a dangerous crush of youngsters aching to get a better glimpse and -- pearl of pearls, even an autograph. The autographs from this visit will be rare.
With 200 uniformed officers lining the auditorium and 200 more on the standby and Police Chief Jesse Curry present with his own daughter and two grandchildren -- there was little danger for anyone. Few of the youngsters got really close to their idols. Even the stage was three times higher than during normal auditorium performances.
and that left Ringo Starr and his drums perched at least 15 feet above the auditorium floor. Even so, if the officers hadn't been there, the Beatles fans could have leaped up there where their hearts stayed all during the evening.
After the show, the Beatles left for a rest, reportedly to a ranch in Missouri;. Their chartered plane lifted from the Dallas Love Field runway at 11;08 pm, well ahead of most of the hundreds of fans who converged to wave goodbye.
Preceding the show, newsmen may--just may---have attended the zaniest press conference in modern times. There were youngsters 13 years old filling most of the seats, representing radio stations with combinations of letters unknown on this sphere.
Older timers didn't really mind that they asked the questions: Are you an anarchist, Paul?
"I don't know what the word means."
Will someone get your tonsils, Ringo, as a souvenir?
"I;ll have no use for them."
Are you scared when crowds scream at you, John?
"More so here (in Dallas) than other places, perhaps."
There were sighs of relief, there. And an older timer wondered aloud if Rudy Vailee was ever asked if he carried a transistorized amplifier in his megaphone.
John, where do you write your songs?
"In hotel rooms."
The tour managers said this would be the Beatles last press conference in America. Golly. It sort of gets you.
Earlier, Cheryl Howards, the 10 year old victim of a hit and run driver some weeks ago, received a telephone call from Paul McCartney as she fought another day of her recovery at Methodist Hospital. Paul told her:
"A pity you can't be with us tonight at the program...."
And it was that all right.
Elsewhere in the city, Beatle fans did their best to work off their frustrations as best they could. Five girls tired to break through a police cordon to meet the Beatles at the Cabana Hotel. When they found all entrances blocked off, they took the only other route available: They dived into the Cabana fountain crying, "We love you Beatles, oh yes we do."
It was wild.