A Silver Lake girl smuggled a transistor radio to bed one night and listened to music at low volume while her parents thought she was asleep.
Around midnight, a catchy new song caught her ear.
“Oh, yeah … I’ll tell you something … I think you’ll understand …”
Linda Seib, who now lives in Green, vividly recalls that joyful moment when she first heard the Beatles song I Want to Hold Your Hand in late December 1963.
“It was just incredible,” she said. “I just couldn’t believe it and I told everyone the next day about it. That’s before anybody knew who the Beatles were.”
A lifelong fan was born overnight.
Beatlemania swept the nation a couple of months later when the Fab Four performed before a shrieking audience on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964.
Linda plastered Beatles posters on her bedroom walls and bought all the English group’s magazines and records, including the album Meet the Beatles! Little did she know that she was destined to meet the Beatles before the year was done.
WHK radio announced it was bringing the Beatles to Cleveland for a concert Sept. 15, 1964, at Public Auditorium. As part of the promotion, the station sponsored a contest for a dozen young fans to attend a special news conference to interview the band.
Seib said contestants were instructed to send postcards to their favorite WHK deejays to be selected in drawings. She and her friend Carolyn Lynch, who were both entering the ninth grade at Cuyahoga Falls High School, got together and began filling out postcards. Seib mailed 17 of them and had a strategy.
“I thought, well, I’m going to send mine to Al James,” Seib said with a laugh. “He’s on in the middle of the night. No one listens in the middle of the night.”
About a week later, the telephone rang.
“Carolyn called me screaming and yelling on the phone and said — incoherently almost — she said they called her and she won,” Seib recalled. “She gets to meet the Beatles. And, of course, I’m screaming, too. I’m so happy for her.”
Minutes after the girls said goodbye, the telephone rang again.
“I just had a feeling,” Seib said. “Anyhow, they asked to speak to my mother. … I knew right away — because of the questions she was answering — that I had won, too.”
Now Linda was screaming and yelling. She begged her mother, Ruth Clevenger, for permission to attend the Cleveland event, and her mother agreed to take her.
Talk at school
A week into classes, Linda and Carolyn were the talk of Cuyahoga Falls High.
“They announced it over the PA system that we were leaving that morning to meet the Beatles,” Seib said.
Frenzied mobs of girls invaded Cleveland on the day of the concert, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Beatles. Ruth Clevenger drove her 14-year-old daughter to the Cleveland Sheraton Hotel and had to run a gauntlet of security.
“We had to go around to the back of the building,” Seib said. “There was a special entrance. We worked our way from one security post to another. We went through a lot of scrutiny.”
Finally, they arrived in the lobby, where Ruth Clevenger had to wait. Linda was instructed to take an elevator to an upstairs conference room.
“I was beside myself in anticipation,” Seiber said.
She entered a room filled with bright lights, TV cameras, WHK signs, technicians and police officers. That’s where she reunited with her friend Carolyn and met the other contest winners.
The girls were read the rules. If anyone screamed or did anything out of order, they would be removed immediately. They weren’t allowed to ask for autographs because the Beatles had already signed photographs for them in their hotel room.
“So we were all quite obedient,” Seib said. “We were all terrified that we’d get thrown out.”
It was eerily quiet as Beatles manager Brian Epstein entered the room, followed by suit-clad Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr.
“My first thought was how small they were,” Seib said with a laugh. “You know, for so long, you built them up into some larger-than-life beings. And they were just regular human beings. They looked small. I was expecting giants.”
As the contest winners stood in a line, the Beatles stopped to shake hands and say hello to each girl. Linda brought a camera and snapped a few shaky photos.
“John was really exuberant and a lot of fun,” Seib said. “His personality stands out a lot — as did Paul’s. But he grabbed one of the policemen and said, ‘Let’s get the policemen out of here so we can have some fun.’ ”
Just like the song foretold, the Beatles held Linda’s hand.
“John was real friendly, just amiable, jovial,” she said. “He shook our hands and said, ‘Hi, how are you?’ ”
Dreamy Paul, who was Linda’s favorite Beatle, somehow got turned around and ended up greeting her twice.
“We ended up face to face again!” Seib said. “He shook my hand and said, ‘Wait a minute. We’ve done this already.’ ’’
Don’t worry, Mr. McCartney. The girl didn’t mind.
On the other hand, Harrison and Starr didn’t seem to be enjoying the early morning promotion as much as their counterparts.
“George looked like he had a hard night or something,” Seib said. “He looked a little peaked, kind of green. … It was like a wet-fish kind of handshake. And Ringo was the same. He was tired or something. They were not the same as the other two.”
Questions for Beatles
The Beatles sat behind a long table and began the news conference. Contest winners asked the band questions.
“Of course, my mind went blank,” Seib said. “It was about ready to wrap up and I hadn’t asked a question yet. And I had to do something! All I could think of is that I read somewhere that Ringo liked science-fiction books.
“So they picked me, I was the last one, and I asked him that. He really didn’t know. He laughed and said, ‘I like them, but I don’t have a favorite.’ ”
Thinking back on the panicky question, Seib can only chuckle: “I just bang myself a lot in the head for that.”
She clicked more photos before the conference ended. The Beatles politely excused themselves, facing interviews with professional media before the show that evening.
“I was not allowed to go to the concert,” Seib said.
Although a ticket was available, Ruth Clevenger was afraid her daughter might get hurt in a crowd of screaming girls. Linda’s friend Carolyn was going to the show but was seated elsewhere.
“I started picturing myself getting mauled,” Seib said. “I have mixed feelings on it. I really wanted to go, but I didn’t want to be sitting by myself with people I didn’t know.”
As it turned out, the concert was indeed crazy. A deafening, high-pitched shriek filled the auditorium as the Beatles took the stage. Cleveland police halted the show for 10 minutes to clear the aisles as wailing girls rushed the stage. The concert didn’t resume until deejays pleaded for the fans to behave.
Linda returned home with her mother, swearing that she would never wash the hand that touched the Beatles. After she developed her photos, she was disappointed to see that most of the images were out of focus. The only picture that was sharp featured her mother in the hotel lobby.
“There’s Brian Epstein, believe it or not,” Seib said, deciphering the pictures 50 years later. “This is Paul shaking my friend’s hand. You can tell that’s Ringo, right? That’s Paul and John.”
Seib, who took an early retirement from the University of Akron after 20 years, is self-employed and works for Judit E. Puskas, a professor in chemical and biomolecular engineering.
She has kept her autographed photo of the Beatles in a lock box all these years. Although she has cherished the memento all this time, she’s wondering if she and her husband, Tom, should get it authenticated and appraised.
“I’ve been thinking for the past year or so about selling it and taking a trip or something,” she said.
No matter what she does, she’ll always have the memory of meeting the Beatles.
“Do you believe that?” she said. “My goodness.”
Copy editor Mark J. Price is author of The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, a book from the University of Akron Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.