“Mister city policeman . . .”
— John Lennon, “I Am the Walrus”
In the St. Wenceslaus neighborhood near Johns Hopkins Hospital — back in 1964 when the Beatles were conquering America — Arden Livingston was “Mr. City Policeman.”
Livingston, a Baltimore police detective, was an anchor of the old Czech and Bohemian neighborhood (onetime home of the showman Johnny Eck and William Oktavec, inventor the city’s fabled “painted screens”) near the corner of North Collington and Ashland avenues.
And when the Beatles played the Civic Center on Sept. 13, 1964 — the same date that Francis Scott Key wrote the Star Spangled Banner in 1814 — “Mr. Arden,” as the neighborhood kids called him, was assigned to protect the Fab Four.
The Beatle who sang “If I Fell” at two performances that Sunday in Baltimore was John Lennon, who today would be 68 years old.
“Mr. Arden came down to the house before the concert,” remembered Cathy Minderlein, who posed for pictures on the family porch at 921 N. Linwood Ave. with her cousin — “Beatle Frank” Lidinsky — their bangs combed down across their eyes.
[Lidinsky, a Baltimore lawyer, remembers lobbying Third District Maryland Congressman Edward A. Garmatz in the early 1970s to oppose Richard Nixon’s attempts to deport Lennon.]
“My sister Claire and I had asked Mr. Arden to get us autographs,” said Minderlein, now 58 and living in Carney, decades removed from the days when she wore a ring on every finger in honor of her favorite mop top and went to the Belnord Theater on Pulaski Highway to see “Help!”
“When the concert was over he gave us an autographed [publicity photo] and a photo of himself with the Beatles. That picture of Mr. Arden and the Beatles meant the world to me . . . more than the autographs.”
It is hard to imagine John Lennon, shot to death in New York City on Dec. 8, 1980, now just two years removed from his 70th birthday. He was 40 when he died and — in the way that Buddy Holly will always be 22 — is younger than Cathy Minderlein and all the other eighth-grade girls who screamed their heads off in 1964.
“He is perpetually 40 to me, the John of ‘Double Fantasy,’ younger than I am now,” said Laurie Kovens, who was a student at Fallstaff Middle School in Northwest Baltimore when John was killed.
“What might have happened in the last 28 years if John hadn’t died?” asked Kovens, a writer now living in Philadelphia. “Would he be on the Council of Elders with Nelson Mandela and Jimmy Carter now?”
Asks Kovens: “Would he have played in a free concert in Central Park to get out the vote for Obama? What would a 68-year-old John be like? What would I be like in a world with a 68-year-old John Lennon in it?”
In “Hey Bulldog,” Lennon wrote: “What makes you think you’re something special when you smile?”
When Cathy Minderlein sees the smile of Paul McCartney these days, she glimpses a man once one of the most handsome in the world, a 66-year-old who now, she says, “looks like an old lady in drag.”
Minderlein said she chose Ringo (three months older than Lennon, Ringo is the oldest Beatle, having turned 68 on July 7) as her favorite because so many girls loved Paul it seemed as though the bassist was “already taken.”
[Guitarist and mystic George Harrison, the youngest Beatle, died of cancer in Los Angeles on Nov. 29, 2001 at age 58.]
“It throws you to actually think about John being 68,” said Minderlein. “Holy crap — we’re all getting old!”
Quietly she adds: “But you know something? I appreciate the music more now.”
As for the Crabtown barrister known as “Beatle Frank” Lidinsky — he too is in the vestibule of turning 60 — the man-child still combs his hair across his forehead.
“I love Lennon,” said Lidinsky. “There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t play a Beatles song and think of him . . . the sadness has sunk in instead of dissipating.
“Often I say aloud, ‘If only John were here . . .’”
Rafael Alvarez can be reached at [email protected]
