I have been watching the news clips of the 25th Anniversary of his Murder.
I remember exactly where I was when we heard the news.
I felt like someone close to me had died. Today I found myself crying watching the coverage and listening to the words of Imagine.
Does anyone else here remember where they were or how the news afected you?
I also remember where I was when JFK and his Brother RFK were Murdered.
PF

I was too little at the time, only 4, so I don't remember very much except that my mother cried. Like when my daughter is older, all she'll remember about Katharine Hepburn's death was that I cried and showed her pictures. (She was in some way named after Hepburn, among others...)

But just because I was so young then, and don't remember the day itself, doesn't mean I don't feel it. You know, when I was in high school, we had to do a biographical report on someone we thought of as a great person, specifically someone we thought had brought change in the world for the positive. While my classmates were doing reports on Ghandi and JFK and Ronald Reagan, Marie Curie, etc., I put together a biography of John Lennon. It's weird, I know.

When my daughter was still young enough to let me rock her in my arms and sing her to sleep, Imagine was a frequent song of choice, as well as Hey Jude, She's Leaving Home and Yesterday. She loves John Lennon. I'm glad.

I was 5 when John Lennon was killed. I do remember that it snowed quite a bit that day. I don't remember much about it except my grandmother being upset and seeing a photo of The Beatles on the front page of the paper. I was too young then to understand the full impact of what had happened, but I knew that a very special person had died.

Rhiannon had to do a presentation last year on a significant event that her parents remembered. We chose the day John died. She interviewed me, made a huge poster and read the report to the class. We wanted to play Imagine in the background as she read, but the teacher wouldn't let her.

Dec 8th is a particularly hard day for me, as it's also the day that my mother died, before Lennon, when I was 17.
I remember when I heard the news about Lennon (and I was considerably older than 5), my sister and I exchanged looks and said' Same day as Mom'.

Hope the day passed with some good memories for you too, skunkee.

I was 10 when Lennon was killed and I remember seeing it on the morning news before I left for school. I don't think I quite realised what it meant then. As my parents slept through the 60s and early 70s it wasn't really big news in our house. I'm sure some of my teachers had red eyes though.

Thanks ing, there were some bittersweet ones.

I was 23 (yikes !) and my girlfriend and I were lazing about talking in bed - just a regular day, really. Coffee, work gab, reading. When the phone rang it was my Dad and he never made long distance calls and he was really shaken up about the news he shared (Tina and I hadn't even looked at the news yet). Funny, in a way. My Father loathed the Beatles and everything they stood for or so he liked to present it. He was a standardized 1950s Republican and these long-haired Brits didn't settle with him one bit but, that day, he quite genuinely said: "I think the world has lost another good man. Who made these rules?". Jeesh, I think his being so upset about it upset me the most back then. Somehow Lennon chiseled his legacy into generations and I'm still really not sure how he managed it. There were three other Beatles and many musicians/artists cut down early, for this reason or that, 20 or 30 years ago. But Mr. Lennon stood out among them and I don't think, in his case, being assassinated was the notable factor that makes his memory potent like a rocket. He was just "a good man". Imagine?

I remember my clock radio went off, and I lay there half listening, half dozing, as I did in those days. It occured to me after about the fifth Beatles song in a row, that something was wrong - I remember thinking "Oh no, who's died?"

I was working at a music store and immediately we sold out of all John Lennon's albums and everything that had to deal with the Beatles. I remember thinking that his last album "Double Fantasy" hadn't been a sell-out until his death and what a sad thing that was.

I can't remember. It was my mother's birthday but I would have been here in Jersey with my young children, three and eighteen months.

After his death, I recall it coming out that he had given huge amounts of money to various worthy causes, all secretly. He was a good man, albeit at times misguided, but that's only human. Many of the Lennon/McCartney lyrics were and are said to subtly refer to drugs, but I think these were mere manifestations of Lennon's sense of humour. Put something obscure or meaningless in the song, and get the critics debating it forever!
I'm sure that 100's of years from now Lennon and McCartney's music and lyrics will still be well known, and they will be listed amongst the other great composers of vthe world.