The Night I Became a Teenage Reporter at a Beatles Concert.
Part of The American Time Capsule — preserving the people, places, sounds, traditions, and unforgettable moments that became part of growing up in America.
I was just a junior in high school in 1966 when I scored a press pass and an invitation to sit quietly in the press box at Busch Stadium—high and dry, as it turned out—and watch the Beatles.
Not because I was rich.
Not because I camped out in line.
I had an uncle, Jack Rice, the much beloved brother of my mother, the former Marjorie Ann Rice, who was a longtime writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I knew he was respected, but as a teenager I don’t think I fully understood just how accomplished he was.
Jack’s newspaper career began in 1940 as a sportswriter for the St. Louis Star-Times. He later worked for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat before joining the Post-Dispatch in 1954. After five years as a sportswriter there, he became a feature writer and columnist, remaining with the paper until his retirement in 1980.
Years after his death, in 2022, Jack was inducted into the St. Louis Media History Foundation’s Print Hall of Fame.
The Post-Dispatch’s late editorial page editor Bill Woo called him “one of the finest writers the paper ever had,” whose work was filled with keen observations.
I didn’t know any of that Hall of Fame stuff in 1966.
To me, he was Uncle Jack.
And Uncle Jack thought a teenage kid might have something worth saying about Beatlemania.
He convinced his editor that a teenager’s perspective on the phenomenon might make the story more interesting to readers of all ages.
Getting me into the press box was his idea.
That was the man who thought a teenage kid might have something worth saying about Beatlemania.
He convinced his editor that a teenager’s perspective on the phenomenon might make the story more interesting to readers of all ages.
I didn’t know it at the time, but he had just given me one of the best seats in the house for one of the strangest nights in Beatles history.
The Beatles were onstage.
Thousands of teenagers were screaming.
Lightning was flashing over Busch Stadium.
And somewhere high above all that chaos sat a high-school kid in the press box with credentials from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wondering whether somebody holding an electric guitar in a thunderstorm was about to get fried.
That kid was me.
I Had the Press Pass
Back at school, of course, I had something even better than a story.
I had the press pass.
I remember flashing it around…
Priceless!
That bought you a little status in the hallways.
I wish I had kept that pass.
You rarely recognize memorabilia while you’re still busy making the memories.
It Wasn’t Their Best Concert
The St. Louis concert has never been remembered as one of the Beatles’ finest nights. But whatever it lacked as a concert, it more than made up for as an experience.
So there I was—a high-school kid with a press pass—standing behind my uncle’s chair in the press box high above Busch Stadium.
From up there, you could see everything, almost as if we were covering a baseball game.
Except instead of watching the Cardinals…
we were watching Beatlemania.
And then the weather turned the whole thing into something surreal.
The problem wasn’t the music. Honestly, you couldn’t hear much of the music over the screaming anyway.
The problem was the storm.
A torrential downpour rolled in, drenching the stadium and soaking nearly everyone to the skin.
With one exception.
Me.
I was high and dry up in the press box, looking down at thousands of soaked Beatles fans while lightning cracked across the sky.
People were talking about electrocution.
There were electric guitars, amplifiers, microphones, cables, and all kinds of electrical equipment sitting out there while the storm raged around them.
From where I stood, it was one of the strangest scenes I’d ever witnessed.
My Uncle Gave Me the Best Assignment of My Life
My uncle had already given me glimpses into his world of journalism.
During his time as a sports writer for the St. Louis Globe Democrat I’d tagged along while he interviewed Stan Musial and other Cardinals players. He’d even written about one of my own childhood adventures after a jet cut my kite string.
Journalism fascinated me.
And now he had come up with an assignment no teenage reporter could possibly turn down:
Go watch the Beatles.
His idea was simple. He would cover the concert as an adult journalist. I would watch it as a teenager caught in the middle of Beatlemania.
Looking back, there was something else in that assignment I didn’t appreciate at the time.
My uncle thought what I saw—and what I had to say about it—was worth hearing.
To a high-school kid already fascinated by journalism, that may have mattered almost as much as the press pass.
I Wasn’t Just Watching From the Press Box
Having a press credential didn’t mean I simply walked anywhere I wanted.
Security and the promoters kept us credentialed reporters grouped together at the gate. Shortly before the Beatles were scheduled to appear, we were escorted as a group onto the damp field and allowed to approach the stage.
For a high-school kid who had first watched the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show only two years earlier, suddenly being down on the field that close to the stage was almost impossible to comprehend.
Then the concert was ready to begin.
The guards ordered us off the field.
Everybody out.
We made our way back to the designated press box while the Beatles came running out and Busch Stadium erupted.
That’s where I spent most of the concert—high, dry, and watching more than just the four guys onstage.
I was watching the audience too.
Uncle Jack wasn’t the only St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter covering the night. His friend and colleague Robert K. Sanford was there to cover the concert itself.
Sanford’s report in the Post the following day carried the headline “The Beatles Sing in the Rain for Wet, Enthusiastic Audience.” His story documented the spectacle—the rain, the crowd, the music and the madness surrounding the Beatles’ appearance at Busch Stadium.
Jack had something different in mind.
His would be a feature for the EveryDay Magazine section of the Post.
And I was part of the assignment.
He wanted the teenage boy’s perspective on Beatlemania.
Everybody already knew about the screaming girls.
Jack wanted to know something different:
What did the teenage boys think of Beatlemania?
More specifically, were we screaming too?
My answer was pretty simple.
No. We wanted the girls to stop screaming so we could hear the music.
That was the part of Beatlemania Jack was interested in. The photographs showed girls crying, screaming and sometimes nearly fainting over John, Paul, George and Ringo.
But plenty of teenage boys were Beatles fans too.
We just weren’t screaming.
Then I turned the question around on Jack.
His generation had experienced its own version of teenage hysteria with Frank Sinatra and the bobby-soxers.
“Did the boys scream at Sinatra the way the bobby-soxers did?” I asked him.
I don’t remember his exact answer after all these years, but I’ve always suspected the teenage boys of his generation probably felt much the same way we did.
They weren’t there to scream at Sinatra. They were there to hear him sing.
Maybe that was one part of teenage music fandom that hadn’t changed at all.
The girls screamed.
The boys wanted to hear the music.
Sanford captured the other side of Beatlemania perfectly when he wrote about a 17-year-old girl from Creve Coeur who managed to grab Ringo Starr and then demonstrated the encounter to a reporter, exclaiming:
“I held him like this!”
That was Beatlemania from her side of the barricade.
From mine, I just wished everybody would quiet down long enough for me to hear the band.
There Was Another Crowd Outside
Not everybody in St. Louis was excited that the Beatles had come to town.
Outside Busch Stadium, local Baptist groups were demonstrating over John Lennon’s now-infamous remark that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.”
By the time the Beatles reached St. Louis, the remark had become a national controversy.
The protest I remember wasn’t violent. People picketed outside the stadium and handed out religious literature and anti-Beatles brochures as concertgoers entered.
A lot of those brochures wound up on the ground.
To many of us teenagers, the adults seemed to be reacting to something Lennon had said without understanding the larger context in which he’d said it.
It became another example of the generational divide surrounding rock ‘n’ roll.
Inside the stadium, thousands of teenagers were waiting for the Beatles. Outside, some of their parents’ generation were trying to warn us about them.
If anything, that probably made the Beatles even more interesting.
I remember Uncle Jack’s expression when it was all over.
There was almost a question in his eyes:
Was this really where music was going now?
His generation had already survived Sinatra and the bobby-soxers.
Now mine had unleashed Beatlemania.
The Story That Never Ran
Jack’s plan was to follow Sanford’s straight concert coverage with another piece looking at Beatlemania through the eyes of a teenage boy.
That was supposed to be my part of the story.
He had my observations—the screaming girls, the boys trying to hear the music, and what it felt like for someone my age to watch this phenomenon from inside the stadium.
But the follow-up never appeared.
Years later, Jack told me privately that the newspaper had instructed him that there would be no follow-up article.
He said he was never given a reason.
Jack had his own suspicion.
He wondered whether pressure surrounding the Baptist protests and the controversy over Lennon’s “more popular than Jesus” remark had somehow reached the newspaper.
I have no way of knowing whether Jack was right.
I never saw evidence that anyone threatened the newspaper, and after all these years I wouldn’t present his suspicion as fact.
I only know what my uncle later told me:
the follow-up he intended to write never ran.
Which means my teenage report on Beatlemania never made it into the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Apparently, though, I wasn’t quite finished with the assignment.
The Beatles Had Something Today’s Stars Don’t
They had everybody’s attention at the same time.
There were only three major television networks. Top 40 radio stations played many of the same records. Teen magazines covered the same stars. Newspapers followed their every move.
When the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, families across America weren’t watching thousands of different programs on hundreds of different platforms.
Millions of us were watching the same thing.
Frank Sinatra had the bobby-soxers.
The Beatles had television, radio, newspapers, magazines—and an American mass culture concentrated enough for four guys from Liverpool to seemingly take over the entire country at once.
Today’s biggest performers can have hundreds of millions of followers scattered around the world.
The machinery for creating celebrity is vastly more powerful.
But the audience is vastly more fragmented.
As rock superstardom grew, fandom, sex, celebrity and backstage access eventually developed into an entire culture of their own—something I explore from a very different angle in Live at Carnalgie Hall.
Maybe that’s why Beatlemania still seems different.
It wasn’t simply millions of people going crazy over the same four guys.
It felt like the whole country was going crazy together.
But here’s the thing:
It was FUN
Even as people sat there soaked, the atmosphere was electric in its own right.
The Beatles themselves were out there in that storm, surrounded by electrical equipment, and somehow the show went on.
The rain.
The lightning.
The screaming.
The chaos.
It all stamped itself into my memory so deeply that I can still picture that night six decades later.
I had first seen the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show when I was 15.
That television appearance became one of those rare moments when entertainment turned into history, which is why The Beatles on Ed Sullivan: 8 Minutes That Changed America looks back at the night millions of Americans suddenly realized something different had arrived.
I didn’t even like “I Want to Hold Your Hand” all that much.
At first wondering what all the fuss was about.
But after more of their music came out I knew I was watching something different.
Something important.
Something I liked.
A lot.
Two years later, I wasn’t watching them on television anymore.
I was standing in the press box at Busch Stadium watching Beatlemania happen right in front of me.
Today, I carry every Beatles song ever released on my iPhone.
Think about that.
In 1966, I stood in Busch Stadium trying to hear four guys from Liverpool over thousands of screaming fans and a raging thunderstorm.
Sixty years later, I can carry their entire musical history around in my pocket.
I still listen.
I still never get tired of it.
And every once in a while, one of those songs takes me right back to that night.
The rain.
The lightning.
The screaming.
The Beatles.
Maybe the storm drowned out the music that night at Busch Stadium.
But it didn’t drown out the memory.
My press pass disappeared years ago.
Jack is gone.
The follow-up never appeared in the newspaper.
But the teenage reporter still remembers what he saw.
So, Uncle Jack, here’s the story. Better late than never.
Your Turn
What concert from your younger years would you go back and experience one more time if you could?
Who did you see? Where was it? How old were you—and what happened that made that night impossible to forget?
Maybe it was the music. Maybe it was the person you were with. Maybe something completely unexpected happened.
Tell us about the concert you can still see, hear, and feel all these years later.
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← Return to 🇺🇸 The American Time Capsule
Bunker Rule
Everybody remembers the music of their youth a little differently.
Your Beatles may not be my Beatles, and your memories of Beatlemania may not match mine. That’s part of what makes looking back so interesting.
Share your memories, disagree when you remember it differently, and add your own piece of the story.
Just remember—we’re here to compare memories, not win an argument about them.
Bunker Notice
This story is a personal recollection of seeing the Beatles at Busch Stadium in St. Louis in 1966, written nearly six decades later by someone who was there.
Some historical details can be confirmed through newspaper archives and other contemporary sources. Personal conversations, impressions and memories are presented as I remember them and may differ from other eyewitness accounts.
The history provides the context. The memory is mine.