Stan Young, of West Palm Beach, shot photos of the Beatles during the filming of Help! when he was shooting a fashion shoot. (Sarah Grile/The Palm Beach Post)

Good Day Sunshine: Lunching with the Beatles!

As a fashion photographer for publications such as Redbook, Vogue and Brides in the swinging ’60s, it wasn’t rare for Stan Young to rub shoulders with celebrities.

But while shooting on Paradise Island in the Bahamas, a chance meeting had him sharing lunch with two of the Fab Four.

“We had three or four models and a crew, and noticed that down the beach, there was another professional group,” remembered the West Palm Beach resident.

Suddenly, the famed disc jockey Murray The K walked up to Young’s party and was invited to lunch.

Murray asked if he could “bring the boys,” said Young, who agreed without having any idea to whom he was referring. “And up comes John Lennon!”

The Beatles, it turned out, were filming their second movie, Help!, nearby. Ringo Starr was shooting a scene on the water, and Young thinks it was probably just Lennon and George Harrison who sat down to lunch with him, several models, including his wife, Evelyn Tripp, and actor Victor Spinetti, who also was in the movie. Their conversation turned to further adventures.

“In those days, we rented boats to come over to Paradise Island, these little speedboats with water skis,” he said. “John says to me, ‘You know we have a break now. I would love to water-ski.’ So I said, ‘Oh, take John for a run around!””

During the two hours they spent with the boys, Young shot various photos, until a guy from the Help! production crew came over and saw the camera.

“He said, ‘You know you can’t shoot the boys. Nobody can shoot the Beatles,”” Young recalled, noting that he stopped taking pictures.

Fortunately, he still has them, and his memories of a great afternoon.

“That really was something,” he said. “These were all the good times.

I wanted to hold their hand: ‘No vaccine for Beatlemania!’

“I was 13 years old when The Beatles arrived in America for the first time. I lived in New York City and there was no vaccine that could have prevented my friends and me from catching Beatlemania. Prior to the Beatles’ arrival, we listened mostly to the girl groups like the Shirelles, etc. It was a very exciting time and the world was changing and I wanted to be part of that change. We followed their every move from their arrival at JFK Airport to their hotel to their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Of course, my parents never knew I was at any of these places. When asked where I was going, my response was always the same: “To Judy’s house to study.” Well, the night they were taping The Ed Sullivan Show, my friends and I were there, right outside the Ed Sullivan Theater among all the screaming fans. That night when I came home, my parents asked me where I had been. Of course, I responded “at Judy’s house studying.” My dad looked at me sternly and said, “I will ask you again one more time, young lady. I do not believe that is the correct answer since we just saw you on the 11 o’clock news screaming, “I love you, Paul!”— Theresa Rey,
Boca Raton

We couldn’t work it out
(and turned down the Beatles!)

Every record label executive would probably give all the Grammys in the world to be able to claim that they had signed the Beatles.

Stan Rublowsky can say the exact opposite.

In the early 1960s, Rublowsky, 77, of Hobe Sound, worked in A&R at Columbia Records, where he screened new acts and listened to records in hopes of hearing something to recommend to the label’s brass. Often, British companies would send in records hoping for distribution in the United States.

One such record was “this thing called She Loves You,” Rublowsky says. “Two of us in the committee said ‘Yeah, we should release that.’ The name of the band was The Beatles, who we’d never heard of, but we thought it was a cute name.”

That didn’t fly “with the higher-ups, who said ‘Absolutely not,”” remembers Rublowsky, who helped bring Simon and Garfunkel, among others, to the label. “I have no idea what they didn’t like about it, but they thought it wasn’t worth releasing. We missed out on it.”

Of course, no one at Columbia ever talked about it again. Instead, they went looking for another Beatles. “They got the Dave Clark 5, who were fun, but nothing earth-shattering. … It would have been great to say we’d found The Beatles.”

Dee’s Beatles Memories:
‘I rummaged through Paul’s garbage!’

I was a Beatles fan since 1964. After graduating from high school in 1971, my friend and I saved up money and flew to England and spent 45 days there. We met John Lennon and Yoko Ono when they were signing copies of Yoko’s book titled Grapefruit. We hung out in front of John, Paul, George and Ringo’s houses for hours. We were able to get John and Yoko’s autographs several times. In fact, they signed the Grapefruit book, a few 8-by-10 photos, and John signed the controversial Two Virgins LP sleeve that was banned in America. We even rummaged through Paul’s garbage Dumpster and found a few rare items like car repair receipts, a black-and-white negative of the Beatles performing from their video of All You Need Is Love, a letter written to Mike McCartney, Paul’s brother, and a receipt written to Jane Asher, Paul’s former girlfriend who lived with him at 7 Cavendish Ave. in St. John’s Wood. I also found a script of the Yellow Submarine movie, although I do not believe it is the one they used for the movie.

When my daughter was born in 1976, I even named her Michelle like The Beatles’ song. Their songs were different and made people, especially young people, express inner joy.— Dolores “Dee” Littlefield,
West Palm Beach

In sunset of life, we listen to ‘Yesterday’

When we bought the Juno Beach Fishing Pier in the 1970s, a Palm Beach Post photographer took my picture riding my bike up and down the pier and ran the photos titled, “Penny’s Lane.”

Since my initials are P.S., my husband signs many of his notes and poems to me, “P.S. I Love You”!

We truly have pursued The Long and Winding Road and are so happy to retire early and be Day Trippers, traveling all the roads of the world.

Now, as we are approaching the sunset of our lives, we listen to Yesterday when all our troubles are far away and think back on all our accomplishments and successes.

- Penny Sheltz, North Palm Beach

The day I jammed with George Harrison!

In 1971, John Kaywells, bona fide Beatles fan, was working at the Dan Armstrong Guitars store in Greenwich Village. One day, he got a phone call from a British gentleman who identified himself as Nigel, and said that a Mr. Harrison was interested in coming down to check out the store.

Mr. Harrison, Kaywells knew, could only be George Harrison, who was in New York for the Concert for Bangladesh.

“I said, ‘Are you joking?’ and he said no,” remembers the Palm Beacher, a musician who went on to become, he says, “one of the many guitarists fired by (’80s band) Mr. Mister.”

“Due to his notoriety,” Kaywells says, Nigel asked if it would be imposing to ask me to close the store, and I said ‘No, not a bit.””

So precisely at 1 p.m., “a big white Lincoln limo pulls up, and out jumps George. He couldn’t have weighed 140 pounds,” he says. “He was very slight, and had that English studio tan – white as a ghost. He was very timid, very shy, and said ‘May I play that Strat up there?””

Kaywells says he got Harrison the Stratocaster guitar, and then an old Gibson acoustic, on which the store employee started to strum the chords of The Beatles’ I’ve Got A Feeling. To his delight, Harrison “started playing the melody, with that dead-on precise, wonderful tuning,” Kaywells says. “He was so surprised that I knew all the chords, and said, ‘You know any more?””

The answer was a resounding “Yes,” and the two jammed on Beatles’ songs for about an hour, during which “I was freaking out the whole time, like ‘Oh, my God, it’s not a joke,”” Kaywells says. “He was very polite, very complimentary, and said he liked my playing a lot.”

Harrison was apparently more impressed with the jam session than with the guitar, which he decided was overpriced, leaving the store without buying anything.

- Leslie Gray Streeter

I had a ticket to ride with Paul McCartney!

In 1964, Bill Gralnick had a ticket to ride back to college in Washington, D.C., from home in Brooklyn, but wound up spending a couple of minutes riding face-to-face with Paul McCartney.

“I couldn’t get a flight, and had to take the train. I couldn’t understand when I got to Grand Central what the hell was going on,” he remembers. “It was absolute pandemonium, but I didn’t know why until halfway to Washington.”

What the George Washington University student didn’t know was that The Beatles, the premier pandemonium-starters of the day, were on the same train, which explained the kids at the Philadelphia station who “were just coming over the embankment like lemmings running off a cliff. Every station we went through, there were literally hundreds of children who had heard that The Beatles were on the train,” he says.

Gralnick, 65, of Boca Raton, however, had not gotten that memo, so he was perplexed when he walked to the end of the train car, but was unable to open the door to the connecting platform between cars. Immediately, he figured out why – there, on the other side of the glass, “was Paul making faces at me.”

A surreal scene commenced, with the student and the soon-to-be legend goofing off – “I put my nose up against the glass, and we were nose to nose. He started teasing me ‘Come on in, come on in!,”” Gralnick says. He says he doesn’t remember exactly how long they stood there – probably no more than a minute or two. But he does remember how the Beatles’ ride ended.

“There were cops everywhere, and they just ran them off the train like football players,” Gralnick says. “They cordoned them off as they ran through, and then (the band) hopped into a limo, and off they went. And that was the end of our association.”

- Leslie Gray StreeterDisc jockey Jack Gale barely got into Boston Garden in time to emcee The Beatles appearance there in September 1964. And when he did, he barely had time to speak before being shouted off-stage by impatient fans demanding to see their heartthrobs . . . NOW.

“They were stomping, shouting ‘We want The Beatles! We want The Beatles,”” Gale, now of Palm City, remembers. “You couldn’t hear anything (of the music). My ears still hurt the next year.”

Gale, who had been a record producer in Nashville, came to Boston’s WMEX toward the end of 1963 and took the radio persona Fenway, after the baseball stadium (“I was the third Fenway,” he says.) He was approached by Capitol Records and asked to emcee The Beatles show.

Until then, the biggest thing he’d hosted had been record hops, but Gale agreed. He quickly realized what he’d gotten himself into when he couldn’t get through the “mobbed” traffic to get to Boston Garden, and “had to park 3 miles away and walk through the crowd.”

Getting there turned out to be only half the problem. When Gale got to the Garden and knocked on the door, he didn’t have any ID that confirmed that he was, indeed, Fenway, and not, as the crush of crazed Beatles fans around him insisted, some guy “trying to get in saying he’s Fenway.”

Gale finally got to a Capitol Records promotions guy inside to vouch for him, and hurried inside to an even bigger commotion. The label had arranged several popular singers to open for the Fab Four, including Jackie DeShannon (Put A Little Love In Your Heart), The Exciters (Tell Him) and Clarence “Frogman” Henry (Ain’t Got A Home). The problem was that they couldn’t get an opening with the Beatles-crazed crowd.

“It was really embarrassing. They didn’t give the singers a chance to do anything,” Gale remembers. “Jackie DeShannon sang two lines, and then just walked out, she was so frustrated. They were all ‘Boo! Boo!’ Nobody could sing anything.”

Having successfully “booed everybody off,” Gale says the Beatles fans were “just screaming bloody murder, for about 10 minutes. I didn’t even go back out there until it was time (for the headliners). I ran out and said ‘Here they are, the Beatles!’ and they came running on stage.”

Gale says he never got to meet the band, and got no closer to them than when they ran past to take the stage. And he sure couldn’t hear them, although he now considers them “great writers, who changed the image of the music business.”

My Beatles concert lasted 20 seconds!

I was a 14-year-old boy living in my home town, Miami. A close family member working at the local CBS affiliate in Miami was able to get us tickets for the Beatles’ second appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, which was being taped at the Deauville Hotel, on Miami Beach, February 1964.

With tickets in hand, a good friend (“good” meant he was old enough to drive), and I went to the Deauville, only to find huge crowds, and that hundreds more tickets had been given out than space would allow. We would not be getting in the front door!

Disappointed, but undeterred, we decided to attempt an “attack on the flank.” We jumped a few relatively low walls (a good thing, as even at 14, my athleticism was somewhat lacking), and soon found ourselves at a stairway at the side of the Deauville, leading up to a partially open door.

THE TOP 5 OF THE FAB FOUR?

Our online readers square off against our in-house critics

pbpulse.com readers

1. Abbey Road

2. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

3. The Beatles (The White Album)

4. Rubber Soul

5. Revolver

Palm Beach Post critics

1. Rubber Soul

2. Revolver

3. The Beatles (The White Album)

4. Abbey Road

5. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

- Theresa Rey, Boca Raton- Dolores “Dee” Littlefield, West Palm Beach