Miami '64
It was late in the afternoon of a school day in Miami Beach, Florida in 1964. Renee Ekleberry, my pal and partner in High School Journalism class, stood together outside a hotel door on the threshold of an international phenomenon. The Beatles were in town to tape the Ed Sullivan Show. We were close but still in a corridor of the Deauville Hotel. And although we were fully credentialed with letters from our school principal and approval from Brian Sommerville, the Beatles manager, it had taken us a full day of cajoling police and dodging security guards to reach the threshold of that closed door.
We knocked harder. The door opened, and George Harrison saw us standing there.
My heart went ‘boom’ as we crossed that room, and I took his hand in mine. My clutch bag was under my arm, and when I shook George’s hand, my bag dropped to the floor and out spilled the detritus of daily living. I gathered it all and said a flustered ‘hello’ to John Lennon, but I don’t know what he said. Brian Sommerville told us that Ringo was on the phone, Paul was in the bath, and the Fab Four were in a hurry to dress for the “greatest shoe on earth.”
Pictures were snapped, and we were shown to the opposite side of the door within five minutes.
Although that day was over, it was a flash peak experience and the beginning of a year in which Renee and I interviewed and photographed many celebrities who’d come to Miami to sing in the Boom Boom Room and other hotel nightclubs. Peter, Paul and Mary, Wayne Newton, Bobby Vinton, Jayne Mansfield, Connie Francis, Sonny Liston, Eddie Fisher, Frank Sinatra Jr., Robert Goulet, Jackie Mason, Frankie Avalon, and others posed, signed their names, and spoke with two eager, grateful teenage journalists.
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"Although that day was over, it was a flash peak experience and the beginning of a year in which Renee and I interviewed and photographed many celebrities who’d come to Miami..."