The year 1964 was a pivotal one for The Beatles. On Feb. 7, the four-man band arrived in the United States for the first time. Two days later, they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and attracted 73 million viewers, which, according to Nielsen, was the largest audience ever recorded for an American television broadcast.
The group played Carnegie Hall twice, and by early April, their songs occupied the top five spots in the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. They returned in August for a 30-concert North American tour. They sold millions of records, contributed to the demise of the crewcut, and caused sleepless nights for thousands of teenage girls and many of their parents.
Unknown to most of their fans, The Beatles made two brief — very brief indeed — appearances in northeast Arkansas in September 1964. Unfortunately, neither was a musical gig.
In the midst of their brutal late summer concert schedule, the world’s most popular musical group decided to take a break. The pilot of their chartered jet owned a ranch in southern Missouri about 15 miles north of the Arkansas state line and had arranged for the Fab Four to enjoy a mini-vacation on his secluded property. The nearest airport which could accommodate the large plane was the Walnut Ridge municipal field in northeast Arkansas, a former military complex used for World War II training flights.
Immediately after their Friday, Sept. 18, concert in Dallas, the Beatles hopped aboard their private jet at Love Field and headed 407 miles northeast to Walnut Ridge. As the aircraft circled the deserted runway shortly after midnight, three hometown teenage boys noticed the strange activity and hustled to the usually quiet airport. The Beatles stepped from the big plane, exchanged pleasantries with the stunned local chaps and climbed into a smaller craft, which soon disappeared into the darkness.
If the stories spread by the three young men had skeptics, a co-pilot who had flown the British quartet into town and rented a room at a motel in the community confirmed their accounts. Not only that, he said; The Beatles would soon return to the Walnut Ridge airport to continue their tour. When the group arrived late Sunday morning to catch their chartered flight, 200 to 300 fans eagerly waited on the tarmac.
Although most were giddy teenagers whose parents had allowed them to skip church services, the throng did feature some local dignitaries. The mayor of Walnut Ridge was among the attendees and managed to get all four Beatles to autograph their latest album, Something New, for his 12-year-old daughter, Kathy Hall, who keeps the signed record in a vault and said “If someone offered me a million dollars, I don’t think I would sell it.”
Within minutes, the plane shot down the long runway en route to New York. The Beatles’ experiences in Arkansas were over, but the memories are far from gone.
Those two fleeting visits are commemorated in downtown Walnut Ridge with a 10-foot by 20-foot metal sculpture based on the band’s Abbey Road album cover. Located in a small park on the aptly renamed Abbey Road, it provides a great photo op for Beatles fans of all ages. Enterprising shop owners are capitalizing on the attention and promoters have organized several reasonably successful Beatles at the Ridge festivals to include Beatles tribute bands.
The folks in Walnut Ridge must be doing something right. On Sept. 19, 2011, The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page 1,000-word piece titled, “Beatles Said a Fast Hello, Goodbye but a Tiny Town Won’t Let It Be.”
A couple of years later, Beatles expert Larry Kane, author of When They Were Boys: The True Story of The Beatles’ Rise to the Top, identified the 10 best places across the globe for Beatles history in an interview with USA Today. He mentioned the obvious destinations such as the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York, the Hollywood Bowl and London’s Abbey Road Studios but also included on his list of must-see locations the Beatles Park in Walnut Ridge.
Joe David Rice, former tourism director at the Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage and Tourism, wrote Arkansas Backstories, a delightful book of short stories from A through Z that introduces readers to the state’s lesser-known aspects. Rice’s goal is to help readers acknowledge that Arkansas is a unique and fascinating combination of land and people — a story to be proud of and one certainly worth sharing.
Each month, AY About You will share one of the 165 distinctive essays. We hope these stories will give readers a new appreciation for this geographically compact but delightfully complex place we call home. These Arkansas Backstories columns appear courtesy of the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies at the Central Arkansas Library System. The essays have been collected and published by Butler Center Books in a two-volume set, both of which are now available to purchase on Amazon and at the University of Arkansas Press.
READ ALSO: Arkansas Backstories: Earthquakes
