For almost forty years, I have heard this story multiple times from a dear friend of mine. Now with the 50th Anniversary of The Beatles coming to America, the following was sent to me in an email — and with his permission, I am sharing here it here on Medium…. Yes, my friend Kenny was there at The Ed Sullivan Show — in person to watch The Beatles.

Here’s his story…

I was there at CBS-TV Studio 50 on February 9th, 1964. Sixty percent of all American televisions, 73.7 million people, were tuned in to watch the Ed Sullivan Show that Sunday night. 50,000 New Yorkers had requested tickets but there were 728 seats in the audience. I was ten years old and felt very lucky.

My mother’s first cousin had an extra ticket and decided to send me with her two kids. I was closer in age to Jack than his sixteen year-old sister Elaine. Their father was a Commander in the U.S. Navy. His superior officer, an Admiral, had been given three Ed Sullivan Show tickets but didn’t want them.

During recess at school, AM transistor radios were popular. We were either playing tetherball or listening to the Top 40 on WABC (770) or WMCA (570). It is hard to communicate how big AM radio was in those days. Fifth graders on Long Island knew all about the Beatles by early February 1964. Our parents didn’t. I did my homework every night to Cousin Brucie.

Tom, the Naval Commander, drove us into Manhattan and dropped us off on Broadway, ten blocks north of Times Square. Crowds of pushing, shoving people all were facing the theater building. I had never seen so many policemen in my life. There were very bright lights outside the Broadway theater. We left the car with Tom sitting at the wheel stuck in traffic in the intersection at West 53rd. I remember him saying to meet him right back there after the show and I thought it was funny.

Elaine was good about getting Jack and me into the lobby, but everything inside was already out of her or anyone’s control. We were still kids. Everyone else there was a teenager, a cop, or an adult. Mostly teenagers. As soon as we stepped through the doors, CBS-TV employees separated all the teenage girls from the rest of the crowd. My cousin Jack freaked out a bit as his sister was taken away. Elaine went with the flow, looking back at us only once. There was a lot of screaming going on in the lobby area. We kept our eyes on Elaine as long as we could, as the girls were ushered into the theater. We had to wait a while. I wondered if only teenage girls were being let in to see the show.

Next all the teenage boys were separated from who was left and brought in through the theater doors. The show had not started but the girls, all down front in the first rows, were already screaming and crying. Teenage boys were placed here and there in the rows of girls. Jack and I were close to the last row. If there were 700+ people there, we were in the last 75. It wasn’t far to the stage but we could hardly hear. The only time the screaming quieted down was during the other acts.

Does anyone remember other performers that night? There was a magician doing card tricks, acrobats tumbling, comedians clowning, the entire Broadway cast of Oliver performing, Frank Gorshin doing celebrity impressions, and English music hall star Tessie O’Shea singing “Two-Ton Tessie From Tennessee” to her own banjo accompaniment. Quite a show with the Beatles opening with three numbers and closing the program with two more: “All My Loving”, “Till There Was You”, and “She Loves You”, followed by the variety show acts, before “I Saw Her Standing There” and “I Want To Hold Your Hand”, which was then number one on the US pop charts.

We could not hear much, if anything, when the Beatles were playing. We had to stand up to see over and around the hysterical girls. Girls were crying. They were shaking. We heard the first chord or words, if barely, and that was all we could hear over the incessant yelling. I didn’t know one Beatle from another except that it was Ringo drumming. From that distance, not knowing who was standing where or singing what, Paul, George or John was undistinguishable. Jack had no idea what was going on.

Things calmed down, somewhat, for “Till There Was You” from The Music Man. The adults who were all around us in the back of the theater smiled and nodded; they knew this song. A woman behind me sang along with it. The girls kept screaming but not as loud. On Ed Sullivan that night, the song wooed the older generation of an American audience and won them over.

Sometimes you can look back on one moment in time when everything changed. I can’t say just where it came in “She Loves You” that night, but the world changed during that live performance. The girls’ screaming came now in waves every time a Beatle shook his hair. The band looked jubilant on stage. The crowd was uncontainable. People stomped their feet. Girls were falling down. It felt like the theater was shaking. It was absolutely electric. And very loud and very hot. I looked at Jack. He looked scared. By the last “yeah, yeah, yeah”, that Ed Sullivan theater was in a different place than it had been two minutes earlier. “She Loves You” was going to be number one, I remember thinking. It went to number two the next week, behind “I Want To Hold Your Hand”, and reached the top five weeks later.

I remember how quiet it got for the magician who came on after “She Loves You”. I have read that Fred Kaps was one of the greatest prestidigitators in the world. The audience that night was not even paying attention. It could have been Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris standing there and this New York audience might not have noticed. The girls were whispering, crying, laughing and hugging each other. Jack and I sat there trying to follow what was going on up on the stage. We liked magicians. We wanted to see him but the girls were acting crazy.

The show went by quickly inside that hot, loud theater. The Beatles were back on again at the end but that went by even faster and the screaming came back louder than before. “I Saw Her Standing There” was lost in the noise. “I Want To Hold Your Hand” was barely audible. I remember how the three Beatles were moving around on stage, practically dancing as they sang. And then, suddenly, it was over and the screaming didn’t stop at all. Jack wanted to get out of there and back to his father’s car as fast as possible. I wanted to find his sister but didn’t know how to do that in the crowd. I tried to keep up with Jack who was climbing under railings and squeezing his way down the staircases to the exit. Elaine saw me before I saw her. Somehow we caught up with one another by the time we reached the exit.

Tom was, more or less, where we had left him. He told us he had been circling the block for the whole hour, around and around. It was good to be back in the car. Elaine was still all shook up. She couldn’t quite talk right, her words rattling out of her mouth without making sense. Jack wanted to get out of Manhattan as fast as we could. The crowds had scared him. Me too. I looked out the window at all the girls and all the policemen. I had no idea what I had just experienced. What was there to compare it to? I knew I would remember it as long as I lived.

Much has been made of the fact that this live TV show was less than 80 days after President Kennedy’s assassination. Too much has been written about how America ended its mourning that Sunday night. I think that may be how the media responded, but it wasn’t what kids were thinking about that February night. I don’t think those 600+ teenage girls were thinking about much at all, but they looked like they were feeling something they’d never felt before.

What was it like, really? If you saw it on TV, you saw it better and heard more than I did. What I experienced was the directed separation of the teen girls from everyone else. It was all manipulated for the cameras. I witnessed very loud screaming and teenage girls shaking like I’d never seen.

It all ended very fast. The Beatles bowed in unison. They put down their guitars. Ed Sullivan welcomed them to his part of the stage, said goodnight, and it was all over. The madness, the chaos, and the total abandon were huge for anyone who was there. It was wild. Ed Sullivan had opened a box and something uncontrollable came out and just kept coming. I was lucky to have been there. I have been a fan from that night on.

Kenneth Peck, Ph.D., is a documentary filmmaker and professor of comparative literature and cinema studies who lives in Charlotte, Vermont.