This photograph by Bill Cunningham shows two police officers and a man in a suit trying to hold back a tsunami of screaming girls at Empire Stadium in 1964.
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Sixty years ago this week the Beatles performed at the Empire Stadium.
The concert on August 22, 1964, was the biggest single show of their 1964 North American tour, drawing 20,621 hysterical fans. After 27 minutes, fans broke through security and stormed the stage, and the Fab Four rushed into their limousines to board a plane to Los Angeles.
Vancouver Sun columnist Jack Wasserman nearly had a nervous breakdown during a live radio broadcast of the event because he was convinced there would be a riot. But photos from the concert show that fans were happy, not angry.
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The Sun’s Deni Eagland’s photograph of three teenage girls screaming, crying and laughing simultaneously captures Beatlemania at its peak. Their hysteria is hysterical.
Eagland was known for his unusual photography and took some wonderful pictures of female fans from behind. The photos didn’t make it into the newspaper because they were probably considered risqué at the time. But you can see them here:
One shows four beautifully dressed young women standing on their seats and leaning to the left together to get a better view of the band.
On the other side, a few stylish women with teased hair and tight pants stand on a few seats and observe the chaos with aloof coolness. They look like fans of bad-girl shows like the Shangri-Las.
The best crowd photo, however, is by Bill Cunningham of The Province, showing two police officers and a man in a suit straining to hold back a tsunami of screaming girls, desperately trying to keep the security fence in place.
One policeman braces his back against the onrushing horde, another has bent his knees for better support. And none of the girls in the crowd pay any attention to the incident, as they are transfixed by the Beatles.
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Cunningham’s timing was uncanny. As he took the photo, someone was holding up a picture of Paul McCartney, so you knew exactly who had started the madness. It’s one of the best rock’n’roll crowd photos ever taken.
Cunningham had a knack for taking photos like this. He was such a great photographer that the Vancouver Canucks players nicknamed him Rembrandt.
He was born in Dawson City in the Yukon, but grew up in Kitsilano. His mother was a devout Catholic and sent Bill and his brothers Eric and Jack to a seminary in Ottawa as teenagers to become priests. But none of them did so.
Cunningham began his career as a sports journalist at the Vancouver News Herald, although this was not a full-time job; it was a freelancer.
“He went to the games and got paid per column inch,” explains his son Dan. “He came home and thought he had a three-inch column, but he got one inch.”
He earned his living by working for the old alcohol control authority. In 1943 he moved to the provinces, where he turned to photography around 1945.
He quickly made a name for himself as a photographer because he had a good eye and a knack for getting people to pose the way he wanted.
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In the 1940s and ’50s, he bought his own high-end Hasselblad cameras because they produced better quality images than the company’s Speed Graphics. He also kept most of his negatives, which his family still owns today.
He had foresight – The Province threw away virtually all of its old negatives when the newspaper moved in 1964-65. Fortunately, someone from the Vancouver Public Library rescued some of them from a dumpster.
The Vancouver Library’s Special Collections Department has scanned the old Province images and made them available online, including a 1953 Cunningham shot of Marilyn Monroe posing as a vampire next to a United DC-6 jet at Vancouver Airport.
His most famous photograph shows Pierre and Margaret Trudeau leaving St. Stephen’s Roman Catholic Church in North Vancouver after their secret wedding in 1971. He had been tipped off about the wedding and held his Hasselblad high above the crowd outside the church to take the photo.
Cunningham retired from the province in 1973, but continued to photograph the Canucks for two more decades. He died on July 6, 1993 at the age of 84.
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Editor’s recommendations
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Bev Dietrich Hughes was thrilled when she heard that the Beatles were coming to town on August 22, 1964. So the 16-year-old went to the Empire Stadium with her friends Margaret Forbes and Linda Butler, two days before tickets went on sale.
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On March 4, 1971, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau flew to Vancouver for what was supposed to be a skiing trip. And he did go skiing. But not alone. Trudeau arrived in Vancouver at 6:30 p.m., jumped in a car and drove to St. Stephen’s Roman Catholic Church in North Vancouver, where “the most eligible bachelor in international politics” was marrying Margaret Sinclair of West Vancouver.
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