Remembering Dec. 8, 1980

Linda Hamilton, actress

I was in New York. I sort of grew up in this funny musical family who was out of touch with the rest of the world, on classical music. But I remember how huge it was for everybody around me; it was a citywide phenomenon. It sort of felt like somebody had draped a dark cloth over the entire city for days on end, like a tinge darker.

Dr. Susan Block, author and sex therapist

I'd just left New Haven, Conn., and moved to San Francisco to go to grad school part time and try to be a hippie full time. Folks kept telling me I was a decade too late, but I didn't believe them. I was living in a big beautiful Victorian house on Masonic Avenue near Haight Street, trying to restart the revolution with a bunch of other hippie wannabes.

We were having one of our big organic dinners when one of the members of the house came running downstairs, saying he'd just heard from a friend back East that John Lennon had been killed. At first, we didn't believe it. We thought it was just another Beatles rumor, like Paul being dead. Then we turned on the TV, and it was all over the news. We cried and hugged and put "The White Album" on the record player. I felt numb. I realized that maybe those folks were right: John was dead, Reagan was president, the '80s were underway and it was too late to restart the revolution -- that revolution anyway.

Benicio Del Toro, actor

I know exactly where I was. It was 1980, right? I was in Puerto Rico. My brother was a big fan of the Beatles, and I was too. That album "Double Fantasy" had just come out, with Yoko Ono. I heard in school. My brother came up to me and he said, "They killed John Lennon." I remember I cried.

Anthony York, associate editor, Salon News

I can't pretend I knew who John Lennon was in 1980, being 6 years old as I was, but I do have a vivid memory from the period of his assassination. It was Election Day 1980. I remember my baby sitter, Tom, pulling up to the house in his Renault Le Car and dragging me off with him to his polling place, in a coffee shop at Pepperdine University. He plopped me in front of the Kiss pinball machine as he raced into line to cast his vote for Ronald Reagan.

I still remember the sounds of ELO's "Don't Bring Me Down" cranking from the speakers of that university coffee shop, the wild flapping of flippers and buzzing of bells from the pinball table that lit up under my watchful eye and frenetic fingers. And 20 years later, these things taken together make sense: Reagan's triumphant sweep to office riding a crest of religious conservatism, the abnormal falsetto melody lines of ELO's cocaine synth-pop shaking the glass top of the pinball table before me, the haunting vision of an airbrushed Gene Simmons glaring back from on high, makeup caked on, lizard tongue extended. The violent static electricity of that moment could only have been revolutionary fervor. Lennon was just among the casualties of the ancien régime. And I stood like a statue, moving only my fingers, barely breathing, a 6-year-old sponge in the hills of Malibu, Calif.

Sharon Mitchell, founder, Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation, health watchdog of the adult-film industry

I remember distinctly where I was at the time of John Lennon's death. I was in a limousine, stuck in traffic on Central Park West about two blocks from the Dakota Building. I was with the band that I was currently in, called Neon Leon and the Bondage Babies, and I cried a deep sorrowful cry -- the kind that junkies seldom get to feel but at that moment I felt.

F. Murray Abraham, actor

I was in Morocco with two of my fellow actors -- Denholm Elliot was one and Tony Vogel was the other -- and Tony said, "You Americans -- that couldn't happen anywhere but America, that they would kill someone like Lennon." I remember it distinctly. I told him to drop dead. "Do you really believe there aren't crazy people in England?"

Andrew Leonard, editor, Salon Technology and Business

I was a freshman at the University of Michigan, and I was hanging out in the room across the hall, watching "Monday Night Football." To hear Howard Cosell announce Lennon's death was a true introduction to the surreal.

I had been weaned on the Beatles by a father who helped organize antiwar demonstrations and a mother who had me out on street corners selling McGovern for President buttons in 1972. In high school, my long hair and glasses made me look, said my friends, like a dead ringer for Lennon. I was a walking cliché that night -- like a million other college students, I retreated to my own room, got stoned and played "Imagine" about 100 times.

It was quite the bummer. But you know, for my daughter Tiana's third birthday, I made her a tape of Beatles tunes. She's now 6 and she has most of the songs on the tape memorized. And I've heard her singing along with John on "I Should Have Known Better": "So I should have realized a lot of things before/If this is love you've got to give me more/give me more, hey hey hey, give me more." And when I hear that same note of Lennon-esque gleeful exaltation crack in her voice on that last "more," I know Lennon's not really dead, and never will be.

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Compiled with the assistance of Eric Layton, Jeremy Rosenberg, Brent Simon and Chris Colin.

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