John Lennon: 1940 – 1980
Forty years ago today, at around 11:10pm Eastern Time, John Lennon was pronounced dead in the emergency room of the Roosevelt Hospital in New York City, having been shot four times at close range only twenty minutes earlier.
As I’ve discussed before, I was ten years old at the time and I remember it being all over the news in the UK the next day. It was the beginning of my Beatles fandom.
Every year Beatle fans and many others commemorate Lennon’s death on this day. What makes this anniversary particularly poignant is that Lennon was 40 when he died. This means he has been dead for as long as he lived.
I find it sobering to think how much he packed into those 40 years, and how much the world has changed in the 40 years since he died. In 1980, the personal computer boom was just beginning. There was no internet or email. There were no cell phones. We only had three television stations and listened to most of our music on the radio, or on our record players and cassette recorders.
It seems John Lennon wasn’t supposed to be in New York that night. He and Paul McCartney were supposed to be in London recording, but Paul couldn’t book a studio for the time they wanted. One can only imagine the music they might have been making and would be continuing to make to this day.
For some insight into the events of December 8, 1980, check out this 2010 documentary, “The Day John Lennon Died”:
I like the way his death is handled in the movie Mr. Holland’s Opus.
Yes! I agree that was well done. And I liked that they picked “Beautiful Boy” as a song for him to sing to his son. In fact, that’s just a good movie overall… 🙂