John Lennon Came to My School When I Was 8. Or Did I Imagine It?

New York|John Lennon Came to My School When I Was 8. Or Did I Imagine It?

One morning in the mid-1970s, a solemn announcement came over the intercom at Friends Seminary: “Noted person John Lennon is now in the meetinghouse. Walk, don’t run.”

We didn’t run. But we wanted to.

I ended up perched with the rest of my second-grade class on a hard wooden pew in the balcony of our Quaker school’s meetinghouse on East 16th Street in Manhattan. Built in 1860, the meetinghouse was old, dignified and a little creaky; it had absorbed the echoes of abolitionist debates, suffragist meetings and restless kids failing to sit still. That morning, I wasn’t sitting still. We were children, but we knew the Beatles.

And then, suddenly, there he was: John Lennon.

I remember the hush — a collective inhale — and then the whispers. I’m pretty sure Lennon was dressed in black when he entered. That’s how I always remembered him. He soon stood onstage in his wire-rimmed glasses, looking exactly like the face I’d seen staring from album covers. He was right there.

A ripple of laughter broke the tension. I can still hear his voice, his dry jokes, the wry expression when one boy asked about the beautiful woman who’d accompanied him — not Yoko Ono, but someone else. But the words themselves? Gone. Did he talk about music? Politics? Did he sing? Why was he even there?

For years, I clung to the memory like a relic. It was one of those surreal childhood moments that made me wonder if I had imagined it. It was a story I could tell anywhere — When I was in second grade, John Lennon came to my school! My 22-year-old daughter had heard it so many times she could recite it. But recently, when I brought it up, she looked at me skeptically. “Did that happen?”

I was stunned. Of course it happened. Didn’t it? If this had happened today, there would be mounds of evidence: blurry TikTok clips, tagged Instagram posts, shaky iPhone videos capturing every joke. But in the mid-1970s, an event like this could actually fade and disappear.