Chronicle Covers: Beatlemania overtakes the front page
These were the sounds that rang through the Bay Area that day: Ahhhhhh! Shhhhhhhriek! Rinnnnnnngo!
The Chronicle’s front page from Aug. 19, 1964, covers the Beatles’ arrival in San Francisco and the nearly incomprehensible frenzy that greeted them.
The Fab Four “made an entrance into San Francisco last night that can only be described as hair-raising,” the story read. “The young Englishmen stepped gingerly off a Pan American World Airways jet — “Jet Clipper Beatles” — at 6:25 p.m. and into a black limousine that perilously resembled a hearse.”
The Beatles were the most popular band in the world, and their biggest fans seemed to be teenage girls and young women who couldn’t get enough of their pop songs and hair helmets.
“Several hundred yards away, the Beatlemaniacs — 9,000 strong — were putting on the sort of demonstration that used to win Academy Awards for Bette Davis,” The Chronicle’s Ron Fimrite wrote. “They shrieked, they howled, they fought with a gallant band of 180 San Mateo County sheriff’s deputies ... and on occasion, they fainted dead away.”
You might not believe this, but the story got even better.
“As the limousine approached this grotesque spectacle, a Beatle aide reportedly asked his employers if they seriously planned to risk their expensive necks by stepping out of the machine. “‘Come on fellas,’ legend has Beatle Ringo Starr saying, ‘let’s give it a go.’
By: Tim O'Rourke
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
