New York Police Department log books for the officers given the task of protecting The Beatles from hoards of screaming fans as they conquered America have gone on show.
The little piece of Beatles memorabilia shows the NYPD officers given the job of keeping the world’s hottest property from thousands of their adoring fans for their first visit to the US and their historic performance on the Ed Sullivan show on February 9, 1964.
Detailed as the “visit of Beatles singing group”, the handwritten police blotter lists Sergeants O’Shea, Jones and McAuliffe, with officers Delgado, De Angelo, Lucarelli and Madden among the detachment looking after the four visitors from Liverpool.
The logs were saved from destruction by NYPD officer Patrick Cassidy, whose father was one of the officers on the detail and who in January donated them to the Magical Beatles Museum in Liverpool.
Mr Cassidy said: “The Ed Sullivan theatre is in the confines of my precinct, so one day in 2013 I went into the storage area that holds these books.
“After 50 years they clean out and destroy them, so I looked up February 64 and found the book, which would have been destroyed the following year.”
His father told his son he found the four lads from Liverpool “well dressed and well behaved”, and that they unassumingly thought that “the crowds outside the hotel were for someone else”.
The log further records The Beatles’ first visit to Carnegie Hall and also an incident on February 12 1964 when an officer who was “attempting to restrain the surging crowd” was “knocked off balance” and sustained an injury outside the Plaza Hotel.
The Beatles had already hit number one in the US charts and the anticipation surrounding their arrival from England had not been seen since Elvis Presley in the 1950s as Beatlemania crossed the Atlantic.
Hoards of screaming youngsters and reporters shadowed the band’s every move, with police on alert for fans posing as hotel guests to get close to them.
Their first live TV performance in the US was watched by a then record 73 million people, with 60% of the TVs in the US tuned to the show.
The police log books are now on display at the Magical Beatles Museum, Liverpool.