Excerpt from The Boston Globe:
It was September 12, 1964, the very height of Beatlemania, and 14-year-old Debbie Chase was
exactly where every Beatles fan on the planet wanted to be: in the same room as John, Paul, George and Ringo. But the Newton eighth-grader was determined to get even closer. And soon, on the strength of an audacity she marvels at to this day, she was indeed up close and personal with the Fab Four — thanks to a Globe reporter, Jack Thomas, who still occupies a special place in Chase’s memory.
Having recently released A Hard Day’s Night, the Beatles were in town to perform at the Boston Garden. A psychiatrist had been quoted in a Globearticle claiming the Beatles and their music had a pernicious effect on girls. In response, young Debbie wrote an indignant letter to the newspaper, defending her mop-topped heroes. “Nobody could have been a bigger fan,” she says, noting that her scrapbook was already bulging with newspaper clippings about the Beatles. Her devotion to one of them in particular ran deep: “Paul was my everything,” Chase said in a recent interview over Zoom. “I dreamt about him every night.’’
Pouncing on the opportunity for a feature story, a Globe editor decided to have a staff writer chaperone Debbie to the concert. For the assignment, he chose a 25-year-old reporter who was then writing under the byline John C. Thomas but would become known to generations of Globe readers as Jack Thomas, forging a celebrated career that included stints as a columnist, TV critic, feature writer, and more. Thomas was and is a man of eclectic, wide-ranging musical taste, and in 1964 he was himself a Beatles admirer who had recently bought a copy of A Hard Day’s Night.
He picked Debbie up at her house in the Auburndale section of Newton, and off they headed to Boston. He took her to a pre-concert news briefing with the Fab Four in a second-floor conference room at the Madison Hotel. Thomas inquired whether Debbie wanted to ask the Beatles a question through him, but, she says today, “I couldn’t think of anything that I didn’t already know.” So, Thomas situated her in the back of the room, told her sternly, “Don’t you move six inches till I get back,” and went over to join a knot of fellow reporters.
A few minutes later, Thomas was startled by an unexpected sight: “I looked across the room, and she was crawling on all fours, under TV wires and extension cords as if it was a big cobweb.” To his astonishment, the girl he had brought to the news conference had steadily made her way to a piano adjacent to the table where the Beatles sat, then crouched down behind it. “I’m [on the floor] next to John Lennon, and he’s looking down at me like What the?, and I’m waving at him,” recalls Chase. A couple of minutes later, she says, she grew even bolder, inching out from beneath the table and touching the bottom of the pant leg of each Beatle in turn, before crawling back beneath the piano. At last, Debbie stood up, standing between McCartney and George Harrison. As flashbulbs began popping, the enormity of the moment finally hit her. Seeing the girl’s panicky expression, McCartney put his arm around her and said solicitously: “What’s the matter? You’re shaking. Everything’s going to be OK.” On an impulse, Debbie asked him: “Can I kiss you?” McCartney bent down, tapped his cheek several times, and Debbie kissed him on the cheek.
“He was so kind,” Chase says. Then Ringo Starr came over, extended his hand to the girl, and said in his friendly way: “Hey, glad to meet you.’’ The next day, Debbie discovered that she had attained celebrity status at her middle school. “Everybody wanted to touch the hand that had touched the Beatles, wanted to kiss the lips that kissed the Beatles,” she says. But it’s something simpler about her encounter with the most famous band of the 20th century that stays with Debbie Chase now, six decades later. “What struck me was how nice and kind they were,” she says, then pauses. “I’m going to cry right now. It’s coming back to me. I don’t know if anyone could have had a more special experience than I had. It lives in my heart.”
In Their Own Words 