Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - February 09, 2014, Winnipeg, Manitoba winnipegfreepress. com I T was 50 years ago today... For the baby boom generation, it's a defining moment: Feb. 9, 1964 - the night The Beatles made their live North American television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show . With Beatlemania in full swing across the pond and I Want To Hold Your Hand already climbing the local radio charts, we over here had yet to see the Fab Four perform. Several million Canadians, including yours truly, tuned in that evening and had their world changed forever. One observer noted it was as if our world suddenly turned from black and white to Technicolor. Overnight, everything became Beatles, Beatles, Beatles. " I will never forget that night," says Colleen Titanich. " My father thought it was the beginning of the end of the world because they had long hair. I was eight years old and I thought they were so cool!" Marnie Hocken says, " I could not wait for The Ed Sullivan Show . I sat right in front of the television, couldn't get close enough. I cried when they were singing and my father laughed at me and said they would only last a few months. The performance was over way too fast, but I was completely hooked." At school the next day, there was only one topic of conversation. While the girls gathered to affirm their favourite Beatle, the boys assembled to plot forming their own bands. Within weeks, the number of bands in the city doubled. " I had been thinking about learning to play guitar for about a year prior to that date, but Feb. 9, 1964 cinched my decision," says Paul Newsome. He wasn't alone. " I remember watching it at home in our basement sitting around our 17- inch black and white television," recalls local radio personality Tom Milroy. " Virtually everyone with a TV was watching Ed Sullivan that night. I would have been 11 years old and when we first heard All my Loving ... Wow! Even my parents were impressed because while their hair was long, The Beatles did look clean. I soon dumped the accordion and took up the drums." Adds Ken March, " After watching them on TV, I took my poor immigrant parents hostage until they bought me this replica Beatle bass that I saw in the window of a pawn shop." " I built a guitar out of a stick and some nylon strings," says Ron Siwicki. " My friend Chris and I put on the Beatlemania album and pretended we were The Beatles singing and playing guitars." " I watched The Beatles with my family gathered around the TV on that life- changing Sunday night," musician Gerry Gacek remembers. " My father's first comment was a resounding, ' How can you listen to that noise!' Soon thereafter I made the major investment of buying an EKO violin- shaped bass guitar mainly because it looked like Paul McCartney's Hofner bass. I took the bus all over Winnipeg with my buddies looking for stores that carried Beatle boots. There was an ever- present battle with my parents to grow long hair without them noticing and then not get sent home from school for having long hair. Because of the Beatles' influence, my hockey seasons on Northwood Community Club teams came to an end but it started a new era. I went back to all those community clubs I had played hockey at to now play music." " I was the only guy at MIT [ Manitoba Institute of Technology] with a photo of the Beatles in my locker," says Randy Bachman. His band, Chad Allan & the Reflections, had a contact in the UK sending them British records so it was already performing Beatles songs. But the Sullivan show upped its Beatles quotient. " When we would announce we were doing a Beatles song, CKY deejay Dino Corrie would come out with a giant comb and comb our hair forward and the girls would scream." For Burton Cummings, the inaugural Beatles appearance had repercussions at school. " That Monday morning after the Beatles' North American debut, A. J. Ryckman, the principal of St. John's High, called me down to his office and asked me if I'd seen ' my heroes' on TV the night before. He was a dinosaur in a world that was changing and leaving him behind. I was trying to grow my hair at the time to look like The Beatles' style. Ryckman kicked me out of school for hair that barely came down over my ears and told me not to come back until my hair was ' cut properly.' I didn't get a haircut for a whole week." Local radio stations CKRC and CKY were already on the Beatles bandwagon by the time the group made its television debut. " The Beatles were a huge part of the excitement surrounding the music of that day," says former CKRC radio host Boyd Kozak. " Our station saw them as a huge draw for listenership and created a contest to take two listeners and chaperones to Toronto to see them at Maple Leaf Gardens. I had the responsibility to be the host and cover the event in Toronto with live reports. What a moment." As John Tataryn remembers, " My best friend had a sister who would have been about 12 at that time and after the Ed Sullivan appearance, my friend's house was filled with lunatic junior high school girls playing Beatles 45s and screaming. They bought Beatle wigs and plastic Beatle toy guitars and when they got bored, they made my friends and me put the wigs on, hold the guitars, and sing Beatles songs - which to a group of five- year- olds meant jumping up and down and yelling ' She loves you, ya, ya, ya' over and over again." Children's entertainer Al Simmons witnessed the excitement that night. " As soon as the girls in the audience started screaming, I was transfixed. It was the phenomenon rather than the music that blew me away. There was a gigantic shift in culture literally overnight and it was amazing to witness it. Hairstyles changed. Fights broke out at school between The Greasers and The Mop Heads. I immediately went out and bought a Beatles shirt and received a compliment from a girl when I wore it to school. My Dad bought my brother and I Beatles wigs which were basically a fun- fur bag with an elastic edge that looked like furry bathing caps. We wore them at home for fun but not for long because the tight elastic cut the circulation off to our brains." The Beatles appearance was a life- changer for Junonominated singer/ songwriter/ record producer Dan Donahue. " I wasn't the least bit interested in the hype nor the advance publicity and frankly had no intention of even watching the show. However, I relented and joined my sister and her friends. Whilst the band was hitting the second middle eight of I Want To Hold Your Hand, when the harmony vocal kicks in, that was it for me. I was mesmerized and that's putting it mildly. I had a sense that watching them on that very first Sullivan appearance that history was being made. The Beatles pretty much served to chart my life's course." " Sundays meant going to Grandma's for roast beef and TV, which we didn't have ourselves, starting with Ed Sullivan , then Bonanza and maybe Candid Camera ," recalls Conservation Minister Gord Mackintosh. " Cousins were there and part- way through the Beatles' performance I realized for the first time there was a generation gap in the family. The adults were all saying ' Isn't that silly.' We were all saying ' Isn't that sensational.' OUR WINNIPEG THIS CITY . OUR WEEKLY LOOK AT THE PULSE OF THE CITY A8 SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2014 THE NIGHT that changed everything Winnipeggers talk about the impact the Beatles' first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show had on their lives John Einarson remembers THE BEATLES A T $ 51 billion, the Sochi Olympics cost more that all other past Winter Games combined. That tidbit, now widely repeated, was included in a national news story one night last week, and marked the moment I decided to boycott, as best I can, the Sochi Olympics. Sochi's price tag is 13 times the annual cost of an effective global anti- malaria program. It's about twice the annual cost of eradicating poverty in Canada. It could build, launch and land another 20 new- generation Mars Rovers. It's obscene, made exponentially worse because it's been spent to glorify an increasingly autocratic and corrupt government instead of individual athletic skill and determination. Much has already been said about the Russian government's petty and regressive anti- gay laws, the same ones that may have prompted Russian authorities to censor a fun and cheeky website belonging to the fun and cheeky Canadian bobsled team. The burly gents posed in their underwear, tweeted the picture, earned some favourable retweets from the gays and then found their website banned before the opening ceremonies. That is one relatively inconsequential side- effect of legislation that effectively outlaws the gay- rights movement and has already prompted arrests. The suppression of gay- rights speech is just one element of Russian President Vladimir Putin's growing crackdown on dissidents and activists. There have been new restrictions on protests. Activists and journalists have been jailed on trumped- up charges. Two punk rock singers spent months in a modern- day gulag, only moderately less awful than Ivan Denisovich's. Human Rights Watch called 2012 the worst year for human rights in Russia's recent history, and things have only deteriorated in the lead- up to the Olympics. Much has also been said about the rampant, almost unbelievable corruption related to Sochi's Olympic construction, which has been so behind and botched that Twitter was clogged with gross and funny tales of brown water, filthy rooms and people willing to trade three filched light bulbs for a working door- knob. The humour veiled a deeper problem - that billions have gone unaccounted for and are likely in the hands of some of the world's most ruthless oligarchs. And we won't even talk about the terrorist threat, Russia's suppression of self- determination movements in Chechnya and beyond or the stray dog cull. It's too much. It's too much misery and cronyism and waste and vanity to overlook. It's almost entirely overshadowed the spirit of the Games, and it should. So, I'm boycotting. My boycott is lame. Short of a little retweeting, there is virtually nothing I can do that might directly hurt the Russian government or the International Olympic committee that saw fit to sell the Winter Games to a place where the least serious problem is the almost complete lack of snow. And it's worrisome that any tiny, boycott- like measures might hurt athletes, whose skill and fortitude I can't fathom, but admire. Still, for the next two weeks, I'm going to avoid all television and radio coverage of the Games, especially the relentless and fawning Olympic coverage that's embedded in nearly every local and national moment of CBC News programming now. I'm going cold- turkey on the CBC. I'm also avoiding any newspaper stories about the Games themselves, though I've already failed repeatedly at this and it's only Day 4. But I did try to avert my eyes from the jingoistic hoopla of the opening ceremonies broadcast on the Free Press News Caf� TVs Friday. A boycott also means no Coke Zero or McDonald's french fries or shopping at Canadian Tire or Hudson's Bay with my Visa - all Olympic sponsors. To be fair, I'm not a massive sports fan, so I wouldn't necessarily be glued to the Games. But, it's hard not to get caught up in the Olympics by osmosis. Before competition began, I already knew, somehow, about Regina snowboarder Mark " McLovin'" McMorris's busted rib, the three delightful Dufour- Lapointe sisters who are medal hopefuls in skiing, and Canadian women's hockey legend Hayley Wickenheiser, the momma- bear of Canada's delegation, who is in the twilight of her career. Those athletes embody the best about the Olympics, a global celebration of friendly competition, culture and courage. Unfortunately, thanks largely to one power- hungry man and the willingness of the Olympic movement to appease him, these Games are the worst, and no amount of athletic accomplishment makes up for that. maryagnes. welch@ freepress. mb. ca By Mary Agnes Welch BOYCOTTING the obscene Olympics Sochi Games a monument to oppression and corruption B REAKFAST is the most important meal of the day - or so I hear. For me, " breakfast" is usually chugging down a smoothie while I am frantically pinning up my hair. Being a ballet dancer, I am always on the go and looking to sleep in for an extra 15 minutes; therefore, my love for breakfast and need for sleep becomes confusing. Once I'm finished with my morning ballet class I make an emergency coffee and browse through the overflowing snack drawer in my desk, finding something that suits the current craving. We have long rehearsal days - sometimes dancing up to seven hours in a day; so naturally we like to eat. When I think about a place that I love in Winnipeg, it's difficult not to think of the many great restaurants. I have become a " foodie" recently and I love going out with friends to see what's local and delicious while on tour as well. It's really great exploring the food scenes in different neighbourhoods of Winnipeg. I have always been a firm believer food brings people closer together. One Sunday night after an exhausting week of shows a group of four very- hungry dancers decided to spend the night out, feasting our little hearts out. After ordering much more than the average person would, a waiter cautiously asked the group if we were dancers. Excited and thinking we had been noticed outside our workplace we answered excitedly and he replied, " Oh I thought so, I knew a ballet dancer once and it's amazing how much you guys can consume!" The one local gem I can't get enough of is Stella's Caf� and Bakery. I get to eat breakfast at any time, and who can say no to freshly baked bread with that oh- so- classic Stella's jam? It's also my brunch spot on lazy Sundays where I sit for hours with endless cups of caffeinated beverages and a caf� breakfast ( or grilled cinnamon bun); it's too hard to decide! The best part is when you really can't decide and the staff assures you it's alright, you can add pancakes to the caf� breakfast. Amazing. When we go on tour, I frequently say goodbye to Winnipeg with a trip to Stella's at the airport. Once I even tried to buy jam and take it with me on my travels, only to be stopped by an airport security officer, who reminded me it can't go through on carry on. He flashed me a smile and told me it happens at least once a day. Canada's Royal Winnipeg Ballet second soloist Elizabeth Lamont will be performing the role of Juliet in RWB's next production of the season, Romeo + Juliet. The timeless tale of love and loss returns Feb. 12- 16 at the Centennial Concert Hall. By Elizabeth Lamont Great food, ANYTIME Stella's, where dancers go to satisfy their insatiable appetites THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILES The Beatles ( from left) - Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr on drums and John Lennon - perform on the Ed Sullivan Show in New York City on Feb. 9, 1964. Do you have a favourite place in Winnipeg? We'd like to hear about it. There are no prizes to be won, but if you're published, you get to bask in the admiration of your friends and feel the glow that comes from doing something nice for your city. Email your story to dave. connors@ freepress. mb. ca. BRIAN CASSELLA / MCT FILES BORIS MINKEVICH / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS RWB dancer Elizabeth Lamont grabs a bite at Stella's downtown location. ;