I Wanna Hold Your Hand

Ahhh . . . the good ole' days when you could call a radio station and actually get a request played, even when the DJ had never heard it.

Actually, in this case, it was letter written by a 15 year old girl, and in a Where Are They Now, With A Little History piece by the Washington Post I learned that a 15 year old girl literally helped create Beatlemania.

Capitol's chief talent scout, Dave Dexter, initially didn't find the Beatles "suitable for the American market." And on the day after Christmas, when the record was released, few in America had heard of the quartet.

But plenty of Washingtonians had. They had a big head start on what the rest of the nation would discover — all thanks to an enthusiastic 15-year-old Silver Spring girl and the letter she wrote to a local DJ. Because of that modest note, urging him to locate and play a song by a certain obscure British band, she has been widely credited with helping light the fuse for the explosion that was Beatlemania.

Reluctant to take that credit, she all but vanished many years ago, and attempts to find her have failed. Until now.

Hat Tip to J. Bowen at No Watermelons

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  • 1 - Artie

    Nov 26, 2008 at 3:26 pm

    What is, URL ?

  • 2 - Christopher Rose

    Nov 26, 2008 at 3:39 pm

    A URL is the location of a website or a page on a website. If memory serves it stands for Uniform Resource Locator and it always starts http://. You'd be amazed how many people using the web don't know that.

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