Fan, secretary, family friend
Freda Kelly’s father was “old school,” she says, and so was John Lennon’s Aunt Mimi. More below about the other Beatle parents, but Mary Elizabeth Smith, who raised Lennon in middle-class gentility, indeed had a stern reputation. Still, she generally smiled for the camera, while Freda’s dad had the look of a friendly Irish farmer or Christian Brother.
He didn’t think much, though, of the leather-clad rockers known as the Beatles. “He’d approve of anybody with a suit and tie,” recalled his daughter.
We learn all of this from an absolute gem of a documentary, “Good Ol’ Freda,” which has been shown at venues all over America and is now available via livestreaming or disc on Netflix.
In 1961, the secretary of the Beatles fan club acquired a boyfriend and passed on her job to Freda Kelly, a fellow Liverpool teenager and regular at the group’s lunchtime gigs at the Cavern Club. She hung out with them there in the band room and she’d telephone Paul McCartney at home to request a song for a friend’s birthday the next day or approach him for money owed on postage.
The 16-year-old had left school and was working in a typing pool. Whereas the other secretaries had posters of Pat Boone, Elvis Presley, Tommy Steele or Cliff Richard, Kelly pinned up a tiny photo of her favorite band. “Who are they,” asked the personnel manager one day. “They’re the Beatles. They’re from Liverpool,” Kelly said. “Never heard of them,” he replied.
By: Peter McDermott
Source: Irish Echo
