It was 1980. I was on the Bering Sea aboard a crab boat out of Dutch Harbor, Alaska. We were, if I remember correctly, laid up in the lee of Unalaska Island, sitting out a nasty storm with a bunch of other boats. Nothing was going on so I wandered up to the bridge where one of my pals was standing watch, mostly just keeping an eye on the anchorage and other boats.
As I walked onto the bridge my shipmate said "Someone shot John Lennon". We were always bullshitting each other so I said something like "yeah, sure, whatever" and started looking out over the bay we were holed up in. He persisted that John Lennon had been shot. Finally, he made it clear to me that some crazed gunman had shot John Lennon in front of his brownstone in New York and that he was dead.
I know that people talk about where they were when Jack Kennedy was shot. I barely remember because I was a little boy. I do have vivid memories of the event, but mostly because all of the adults were crying and I did not completely understand why. I remember Kennedy's coffin coming off of the airplane as we watched it on the black and white television.
I remember Dr. King's assasination, but my memories are mostly of the racial trouble that flared up as a direct result. I wasn't yet ten years old, but I knew that bad things were happening. The unrest that followed spread through my neighborhood of Chicago.
I remember when Bobby Kennedy was shot. My mom was driving us in the family VW van as the news came over the radio. She immediately started crying and pulled over to the side of the road near our school. I can still picture the scene of the being inside the stopped van with my mom sobbing at the wheel as I tried to talk to her and tried to keep my little brother calm as well.
I remember when Fred Hampton was shot by the Chicago police. Fred Hampton was a Black Panther from the neighborhood I grew up in, Maywood, Illinois. My mom was active in politics in this old suburb of Chicago and things were even more tense than they had been the year before, straining the community relationships between people of different races who had been trying to work together or sometimes cutting them off altogether.
I remember all of these events but they actually belonged to someone else's generation. I was still a child. But when John Lennon was killed, I was an adult. John Lennon was one of my heroes and more than that. To me, he was a cultural hero as well. When I realized that my friend was telling the truth that day on the crab boat, I simply could not believe it. I said, out loud, "Why would anyone want to shoot John Lennon?" Some deranged maniac with a handgun had killed one of my cultural icons. Why? John Lennon never hurt anyone. People loved him.
That was thirty years ago and I can remember exactly how the scene played out. Looking back on it I can understand the shock that overcame my parents generation with each successive wave of senseless violence. The murders of the Kennedy's, Malcolm X, Dr. King and more must have felt like blow after blow to my parents and their friends.
By the time John Lennon was murdered, I had seen my share of the random and organized violence of modern life. I was 22 years old and had lived through the protests of the war in Viet Nam, been in the army myself, seen the footage of Jonestown, the Mideast and many other examples of madness. Somehow, for me, the news of John Lennon's murder shook me like no other outside event in my life ever had. I did not know John, had never met him, had never even seen him in person. Yet his passing marked a watershed in my life, an event that made absolutely clear to me how tentative and fleeting life can be no matter who you are.
In spite of the transient nature of everything and the uncertainty of life, I think John would have wanted us to keep the faith, whatever that means to each of us and without hurting each other while doing it. A lot of people are missing John Lennon today and mourning his passing. I am just one of them
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