YouTube: John Lennon's death announced by Howard Cosell on "MNF"

Here's how a large chunk of the American populace first heard of this terrible tragedy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gcdz1IRVoM&feature=related

 

Even though Howard was a pro, even he sounds terribly stunned when reading the words "dead on arrival".

Just a few years earlier, John and Howard had a wonderful on-screen interview during Monday Night Football.

 

Very sad, I lived in Europe at the time and have never seen this clip before.

 

This was how I learned of Lennon's death....wasn't even watching the game and just happened to turn it on as Cosell was announcing the news.

Evan

 

I remember that night well. I was watching MNF on my little black and white TV in my bedroom in Vancouver, Washington. I was 12 years-old, not a Beatles or Lennon fan, but certainly understood the significance of the event. I remember running into the living room to tell my mother about it; she was visibly upset.

 

I remember it too. It was around 11:30 pm EST and I was in bed watching MNF and that was the first I heard of it. I think I changed the channel or turned on the radio to get more information, but I remember it distinctly, unfortunately.

 

There are not many things in my adult life that cause me to weep, but whenever I think of that terrible evening, the floodgates open wide. I was watching the game that night and was stunned and absolutely speechless for hours.

 

just like starting over

i was stationed at ft bragg nc watching the game when howard broke this news. i had about 5 other soldiers in the barracks at that time. we just all sat there stunned. quiet as hell.

pfc randall knipple, from minnesota, broke the silence by saying. aw s**t, this f***ing sucks. that pretty much summed up the situation.

the only visions in my head that i could conjur up was the four mop topped beatles running to and from airports with millions of young girls chasing them around.

to make matters worse for me, my youngest daughter lauren renee was born on dec 8th, nine years later. every year she reminds me on her birthday that her mom and I picked a crummy day to have her.

 

I was in bed I had to work in the morning. My old friend and musical mentor Bob called and told me what Cosell had said. I didn't sleep the rest of the night,as my wife, who's birthday we had celebrated Dec 8, held me as I was wracked with sobs and total bewilderment.

 

What an awful, awful time. I got my first VCR about month earlier, and was so looking forward to collecting Beatles video material. I have a lot of VHS tapes of coverage from the days and weeks that followed, but I have never watched it, and probably never will.

 

I remember that too. That's how I heard about it.

 

I was watching that game with my dad.
I was 17 yrs. old. My dad was 39.
I've forgotten a lot of stuff in the intervening years,
but I've never forgotten that.

 

I wasn't watching the game, but I'll chime in...

I was a 14-year old Beatle fan that was debating whether it was worth the princely sum of $7 or so to buy my first solo-Beatle album, knowing that John only had half the songs on it. Several of the album's tunes had received saturation-level airplay in my town (Mpls), since the album's release, and I quite enjoyed all of John's tunes.

So I went to bed and was literally flipping the dial on my radio, trying to find one of John's new songs, when I heard a dj say he had some really awful news. I figured the Russians had invaded Poland, because the big news story of the day was that they were doing troop exercises there that were making the West as nervous as the Solidarity movement was making them...

But no, the dj said that John had been shot in NYC and they were waiting to hear the extent of his injuries. I got up out of bed, went into my parents' room, and dialed a radio station's "listener line". I got through immediately to a different station than the one that had broke the news. I told whoever answered that I'd heard John Lennon had been shot, and did they have any more info.

"Yeah. He's dead. We'll have it on-air in two minutes." Click.

I didn't have any trouble finding John songs on the radio that evening.

 

I've never been a football fan but the game was on in a bar a buddy of mine and myself were in after we went bowling.

I couldn't believe my ears.

Woke up the next morning wanting to believe it was a bad dream but the morning paper had the awful front page news.

Called in sick to work that day.

 

I had been watching a bit of Monday Night Football but had changed over to a local community access channel (in Winnipeg, my hometown). They were running a several part documentary on the history of popular music. At the end of the episode they teed up the next installment which was on the Beatles and showed a black and white clip of the Fab Four.

Then I flipped over to local indie TV station CKND (now Global Winnipeg) for the late evening news and was speechless. I immediately started calling several music friends to get together. As I was driving to one of my friend's homes I dialed up WLS and a few other U.S. AM stations on the skip to see if I could get any other information. There was of course no CNN or www back then.

 

This was a day (if you were alive in 1980) that will (sadly) always be remembered as a "where were you..." day. I was driving into NYC at the time it hapenned, listening to the reports on the radio in disbelief...

 

Because this happened late on a Monday evening, many were in bed asleep to get up early for work the next day. Imagine waking up to a Beatles song on your clock radio but not hearing an announcement. You turn it off and get ready for work in silence to not wake anyone else up. Then you go down to the bus stop in the dark at 7 am and see a friend there at the stop ahead with the paper in his hands. He shows it to you and it says: JOHN LENNON SHOT DEAD.
People were screaming and crying all the way into downtown Toronto that day on the TTC.
From 7am until 8:30pm, I witnessed the biggest (and saddest) mass grieving in public that I've ever seen.
I cried as well; there was no shame that morning in showing how you felt.
We lost a hero and a friend that we had just gotten back it seemed.
The dream was over.
One of the saddest days of my life.
I was 21.

 

I was 11, in the first flush of Beatle fandom, and was actually reading a book about the Beatles when my mother came to tell me the news.

 

I was a freshman at Purdue. I had forgotten what I was doing when I heard the new. I now remember that Howard Cosell was the person who told me. What a tragedy.

 

More video from that night: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCYN0xf6lFM&NR=1

 

Man I hope Paul's time to go is a long long ways from now.

 

Even KFWB was playing the songs, and that was after they went all-news.

 

I didn't see it that night, I was already asleep (aged 13 at the time). I found out the next morning, as my mother always had the radio on while I was sitting eating my cereal before heading off to school. I can even remember the precise words the DJ used in announcing it. I had a spoon full of cereal in mid-air, which I just dropped into the bowl.

I'm not sure I want to watch the clip. Too many bad memories.

 

I remember it well. I was actually hanging out with a friend of mine whose dad fixed TVs at the shop. We were drinking some really good altar wine that local monks made (I can't make this up) and listening to shortwave and I first heard it on some Middle Eastern station. We scrambled to get local TV on-two buzzed guys in a TV shop that couldn't find a working set-and we finally did and got the football game on. Cosell first announced that he'd been shot, no news on his condition, and a while later the clip you see on YouTube.

Sad.

 

The game was on our TV, but I was in the bathroom during Howard's announcement. When I came back to the living room, my brother just dead-panned "Some nut just shot John Lennon and killed him".
I had only really started getting into the Beatles heavily earlier that year.

It's chilling to hear that announcement all over again.