This Bird Has Flown

The morning of December 9, 1980 was much like any other at first. I was a Senior in high school. I woke up early for some reason. The first thing I did every morning was turn on my radio, which was tuned to WABC. It was still a music station then. The morning DJ at the time was Dan Ingram. For those of you who remember New York radio in those days, this was a brief experiment on WABC's part, and it wasn't too much longer before he was back at the afternoon drive shift.

If you don't know him, Dan Ingram is probably one of the best disk jockeys ever. He's funny, he's clever, he's sincere. If Bruce Morrow was everyone's cousin, Dan Ingram was the uncle with the bizarre sense of humor. When Chairman Mao visited New York City, Dan suggested that the Chairman looked a little like the guy who did his laundry. Many time he'd talk back to the records or the commercials, usually taking them out of context: "No sir, I would NEVER 'void where prohibited'." Dan's shift usually flew by because you had so much fun listening to him.

This morning, however, he was rather somber. Something had happened and it took several minutes for me to piece it together because of the time that I came in. There were references to "he" and "him" and it was only very slowly that I realized that John Lennon was dead. Not only that he was dead, but that somebody who was known perhaps worldwide for his efforts at peace had died a violent death. A lone gunman, someone described by a local police officer as "a wack job", had ambushed Lennon late the night before, as he returned home from a recording session, the one that would ultimately become the Milk and Honey album.

In retrospect, even though police were there in a heartbeat, and even though they didn't bother waiting for an ambulance (they piled him into a cruiser and drove him to the hospital), he arrived at the hospital alive but it was too late; there was too much damage done. He had no pulse, no blood pressure. He wasn't breathing. They worked on him for maybe twenty minutes before they gave up.

I got to school early every day because I was the guy who did the morning announcements on the PA system. I remember taking notes on all of this because I wanted to share some of this information. When I got to school I realized that there were people who still didn't know everything that had happened. For many of the people in Kings Park High School that morning, I was the person who broke the news that Lennon had died.

Twenty-five years ago today, John Lennon was killed outside his apartment house. I still remember some parts of that day vividly.

We all shine on.