Please excuse my digressions Clare S, I'll try to not do it again.

I watched the Beatles first appearance on Ed Sullivan on TV at my grandmother's farm in Nova Scotia. On the farm, they only get two channels on the TV. 'This one and the other one,' my uncle told me when I asked him what stations he got a few years ago.

My grandmother always choose Ed on Sunday nights, so we couldn't have watched the other channel, even if we wanted to. The Beatles made females scream. They didn't make my grandmother didn't scream. That was probably a good thing. In the late 1940s a Doctor had told her that her heart was bad and indicated that she didn't have long to live. She expressed a slight contempt for the Beatles (but not as much contempt as she had for Elvis) and lived on into the 1970s.

Unlike Peter T., I didn't realize that the Ed Sullivan was a historical event. Perhaps the influential women in our lives make a big difference in how we see the world. Peter's excited, Beatle-fan mother may have made it an incredible event for him. My mother died a few months before I moved to the farm and about a year before the Beatles played Ed Sullivan. My five brothers and sisters had been sent to live with other relatives in Nova Scotia, Quebec and Ontario. I lived on this isolated farm, about a mile off a highway, with my grandmother and uncle. They didn't see the Beatles as having any significance to the serious work of making a living at farming and they were right. The dairy cattle still needed hay the next morning and so did the two work horses, Tom and Jerry.

The Beatle music interested me but the radio picked up a lot of noise from nearby navey radio towers. My grandmother also had a habit of turning off the radio once she had heard the new, weather and farm market prices. The first time I remember being extremely moved by a Beatle was on a school bus that was driving me home from school. A girls in my class, who I had probably glanced at too often as the depressed new kid, held a crackly transistor radio up to the bus window to get better reception. The Beatles were screaming 'I Saw Her Standing There.' I can still feel my heart speeding up as I watched and listened from the other side of the bus.