Remembering John Lennon

Twenty-seven years ago today, John Lennon was gunned down in front of his apartment building in New York.

I think that was perhaps the most significant event that occurred during my college days. And my college days seemed to be filled with significant events.

Even today, more than a quarter of a century later, the thought of the night that Lennon was killed brings back vivid memories. Of all people, I got the news from Howard Cosell during that night’s broadcast of Monday Night Football. I don’t remember which teams were playing that night, but I’ll always remember hearing the news.

I had just turned 21, and I was with some friends at a local watering hole. It was during final exams, although none of us had an exam scheduled for the next day. My friends and I had all turned 21 within the previous three weeks and we were celebrating, you might say.

What had been a light-hearted evening shared by friends who were enjoying their first night together as legal adults dissolved into tragedy almost immediately.

It was a different world in those days. Cable wasn’t the pervasive influence it is today, and, while CNN existed, it wasn’t a part of the basic cable package. You had to pay extra for it. That is, if it was even available in your area.

To get breaking news, you still had to rely on local network affiliates. And I remember going home that night and frantically switching channels until I found one providing a report on the shooting. I guess I needed to confirm the information. Maybe I didn’t fully trust Cosell. Or maybe I just didn’t want to believe what I had heard.

In the Liverpool Echo, Dawn Collinson reflects on the night Lennon was killed. Liverpool, of course, felt the impact of the murder more keenly than almost any other city in the world, since it truly was the birthplace of the Beatles.

A couple of years ago, on the 25th anniversary of the shooting, I read numerous articles online about Lennon, the Beatles, and Lennon’s assassin, Mark David Chapman.

Many of those articles had sections where readers could post their reactions. One reader posted something about how wrong it was for people to remember the anniversary of Lennon’s death instead of observing the anniversary of Pearl Harbor the previous day.

The statement wasn’t true, of course. Then, as now, there was an observation of Pearl Harbor on December 7 by veterans of that attack in Hawaii. But Pearl Harbor was more than 65 years ago, and, in the natural progression of time, the vets of Pearl Harbor are dying off. There will come a time when no one alive remembers what happened that Sunday in 1941 that lives in infamy.

Just as there will come a time when no one alive remembers the shooting of John Lennon on that Monday night in 1980.

But does that mean those events will cease to be acknowledged? No. History doesn’t really work the way that reader suggested. No one I’ve ever known made a choice between whether to acknowledge the Pearl Harbor anniversary on the 7th or the Lennon killing on the 8th. For my part, I’ve always acknowledged both sacrifices.

In The Star, Kathleen O’Hara writes today about Lennon’s memory. The latest example of the ongoing interest in the late former Beatle is a new film, ”The Killing of John Lennon,” which apparently just opened in London, where O’Hara is based these days.

The film is due to open in the United States on January 2. And, from what I’ve read, it focuses mostly on Chapman and his descent into madness.

O’Hara recalls her experience as a youngster living in Toronto at the height of Beatlemania. And she explains her reasoning for not wanting to see the film.

”I prefer to remember the John Lennon I saw deftly dodging a popcorn box in Toronto,” she writes, ”than the one lying in blood outside the Dakota apartment building in New York City.”

I’m not sure that memories or the mind work that way. Are choices like that really possible?

O’Hara may want to remember seeing Lennon and the Beatles in concert in the 1960s, but she may not be able to divorce that memory from the one of his death in 1980.

Nor can I successfully separate my memories of the Beatles and Lennon’s fledgling comeback effort earlier in 1980 from my recollection of Cosell reporting the shooting.

It’s all part of the tapestry of the human experience.