WALNUT RIDGE — WALNUT RIDGE - A twin-engine passenger plane circling Walnut Ridge late one Friday night in 1964 meant one thing, Jack Allison, the owner of the town’s Polar Freeze, recalled 47 years later.
Trouble.
“We weren’t used to having big planes out there,” said Allison, who has owned the drive-in restaurant on the northern edge of town for 54 years.
“I thought they were looking for a place to make an emergency landing.”
He told three teenagers who pulled into the restaurant’s parking lot the nightof Sept. 18, 1964, to drive to the Walnut Ridge airport and check it out.
When the three returned an hour later, they told of meeting The Beatles. Themusic group landed at the airport and then transferred to a smaller airplane before taking off again, heading to a Missouri farm for a two-day vacation between performances in Dallas and New York.
Allison didn’t believe their story.
“I said to those boys, ‘Dadburn it, don’t go spreading that stuff around,’” Allison said.
But word quickly spread, and on Sept. 20, 1964, more than 300 people waited at the Walnut Ridge airport in hopes of catching a glimpse of the famous musicians upon their return to their larger plane.
Nearly a half-century later, Walnut Ridge residents still talk of the days the internationally known rock group showed up at the small Lawrence County airport.
To honor The Beatles’ visit, townsfolk will hold a downtown festival Sept. 18 to coincide with the anniversary of the group’s landing. They will also unveil a statue of thefour members and a 10-footby-20-foot engraving that features a life-size replica of the group’s Abbey Road album cover.
The Liverpool Legends, a Branson Beatles’ tribute band, will perform at the Regions Bank downtown at 5 p.m. Sept. 18. The band is managed by Louise Harrison, sister of Beatles guitarist and vocalist George Harrison.
The unveiling of the statue and engraving will follow at 6 p.m., said Charles Snapp, an organizer of the event.
“It had a huge impact on the town,” said Charles Snapp, who said his sister, Carrie Mae Snapp, “dragged” him to the airport that Sunday to see The Beatles.
“You can see now, 47 years later, people go back to that day when they talk about it. They revert back to when they were 14 or 16 years old when they saw The Beatles.
“Back then, you didn’t hop in your car and drive to Memphis or Dallas or St. Louis to see them,” Charles Snapp said. “We knew who they were, but we never thought we’d ever see The Beatles in person.”
The group had finished playing a concert in Dallas and after a grueling summer of touring, they wanted to take a small vacation. Reed Pigman, the owner of the airline that flew the musicians that summer, owned a ranch near Alton, Mo., and told them they could stay there during the break.
“They couldn’t go anywhere without crowds following them,” said Bob Tucker of Hot Springs, who played in the Bill Black Combo and toured with The Beatles in 1964.
“We’d leave right after the shows in the night to avoid crowds.”
Walnut Ridge’s airport was the only one around that could handle the 100-seat DC-8 aircraft that the group used, Tucker said.
When the plane landed at the airport after 10 p.m. on Sept. 18, 1964, the four band members stood on the tarmac and briefly talked to the three boys Allison sent before they boarded a smaller plane bound for Pigman’s ranch.
“They came over incognito,” Allison said. “I told the boys not to be telling everyone. Most people wouldn’t believe it.”
But one of the boys - Gene Matthews, who later became the Lawrence County sheriff and was killed in a 1983 shootout - called Carrie Mae Snapp later that night and told her of meeting Paul Mc-Cartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr.
Carrie Mae Snapp’s parents owned the Alamo Court, a local hotel where the band’s pilot was staying, and she learned when the four would return to the airport.
“He said he couldn’t tell us, but he said we shouldn’t go to church Sunday if we wanted to see them,” said Carrie Mae Snapp, who was 14 at the time.
In an age without Internet, instant messaging or cell phones, word quickly spread in the small town. Carrie Mae Snapp called her friends on the rotary-dial wall phone in the hallway of her home. Those friends called others.
By Sunday, a crowd waited at the airport for the band’s return.
“We thought you had a better chance of Sputnik landing on your head than seeing The Beatles land in Walnut Ridge,” Carrie Mae Snapp said, referring to a Soviet satellite launched in the late 1950s.
Lennon and Starr flew back to Walnut Ridge. Mc-Cartney and Harrison - fearing flight in Pigman’s small aircraft - rode back in a 1962 Chevrolet Suburban.
“A little yellow airplane landed, and all the girls went crazy,” Carrie Mae Snapp said. “But it wasn’t The Beatles. It was a crop-duster. Can you imagine the pilot’s reaction seeing a bunch of screaming girls running at him?”
Carrie Mae Snapp didn’trealize it at the time, but she stood next to the Suburban bearing McCartney and Harrison for 30 minutes while waiting for the plane.
“When the plane landed, out popped Paul and George,” she said. “They were less than 4 feet from me.”
The four boarded the plane and, according to varying reports, one or two ofthem waved at the fans as they took off.
“That was enough for me,” Carrie Mae Snapp said. “I had seen The Beatles. How many kids can say that in Arkansas? We knew how fortunate we were. We knew they were here.”
Carrie Mae Snapp took more than a wave from the airport, though, she said. She and four friends jimmied the emergency door of the band’s airplane on that Saturday and took five small pillows from the seats, each imagining one of musicians lay his head on the pillow.
“My father made us give the pillows back,” she said. “But we kept the pillow cases.”
After the Sept. 18 unveiling of the album cover engraving, Charles Snapp and others will move it to a pavilion at 110 SW Second St. in Walnut Ridge, where it will be displayed.
Danny West, owner of Iron Mountain Metal Works,spent more than 500 hours engraving the album’s cover on five quarter-inch sheets of aluminum.
He included the Volkswagen - with license plate LMW281F - made famous on the cover, along with other life-size cars, trees, sidewalks and the striped crossing in front of the Abbey Road Studios.
“I had a little bit of apprehension when I started,” West, who said he’s not an “artist.” “I didn’t want to make a mistake. The whole town is watching.”
Charles Snapp hopes to parlay The Beatles’ stopover into tourism dollars for the Lawrence County town. He envisions building a small museum near the engraving someday.
Town leaders also are building a sidewalk in the shape of a guitar near downtown to recognize the musicians who played rock ‘n’ roll and rockabilly music along U.S. 67, which passes through Walnut Ridge. State legislators named the highway the “Rock ‘N’ Roll Highway” in 2009.
Promoters of the Sept. 18 event call it “The British Invasion of the Rock ‘N’ Roll Highway.”
“It’s fantastic,” said Henry Boyce of Newport, who organized the town’s yearly Depot Days festival.
“The sky’s the limit. We’re creatively just getting started on the Rock ‘N’ Roll Highway.”
The town is also embracing the band’s visit. The Walnut Ridge High School band will perform Beatles songs during halftimes at the school’s football games, and city leaders hope to rename Southwest Second Street to Abbey Road.
“People ask us if we’re Beatles fanatics,” Charles Snapp said. “We just like their music. We don’t mind if you are fanatic. We don’t mind if you don’t like them. Just come and see what we have.
“It’s not just The Beatles,” he said. “It’s the fact that The Beatles were here.”
Arkansas, Pages 15 on 09/04/2011