Growing up in the NY area it was tragic day beyond belief. I was in 9th grade and many kids were headed to the city to go stand vigil outside the Dakota. In my high school we had what was called a ‘breezeway’ between two main sections of the school that had a row of glass doors leading outside, and on ordinary days, kids between classes would just congregate sitting along the wall, either talking or reading just a place to socialize informally, and it was tolerated as long as they didn’t create any problems and didn’t block the hallway entirely. On that day that Lennon had been shot that morning at least one of the kids had brought in a boom box and basically they played John Lennon and Beatles songs all day in that breezeway and a lot of kids could not even bring themselves to go to class, but what I remember most about it is that I felt like the faculty our teachers were sympathetic to this, and nobody gave them absences if they were sitting there, grieving, consoling each other on that day just listening to the music and talking about their experiences and memories of listening to the music. I sat with them for a few minutes, but it was just too sad so I still made myself go to classes. Where I grew up like I said, and in that kind of predominately white American middle to upper class suburbia (think John Hughes movies) this was probably playing out very similarly across the country whereas I expect that if it had been somewhere slightly different or diverse, it might’ve played out differently, although obviously being a former beetle and one of the most popular people in the world at the time and he had just had a record released the first one in five years, called Double Fantasy, it was supposed to be the beginning of a big comeback and he was doing the rounds of interviews and promoting it, instead it was punctuated by this incredible tragedy. Many people will say that they feel like that was the end of a certain era and that this happened right before the inauguration of Reagan and it seemed like there was a turning point going on in this country. Not necessarily for the better in the minds of a lot of youth. Others may never have even connected those two things, I only do in hindsight.