| Sixty years ago today, thousands of screaming teen-agers startled their parents and rattled TV crews during a frenzied scene at John F. Kennedy Airport. George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney, and John Lennon had just landed in New York City, unleashing pop music’s British Invasion and igniting the U.S. arrival of Beatlemania. Readers of The New Yorker would already have known what to expect on the tarmac. Two months earlier, The Talk of the Town had reported on a “rapidly developing craze” in England, where flights at London Airport had been thrown off schedule by the band’s return from a Swedish tour. One of the impacted airliners had carried no less notable a passenger than the Queen Mother, but she may have taken the delay in stride: the piece notes that the royal matriarch had seemed “impressed” by the band at an earlier performance in London, and that she was “reported to have conversed” with the young men backstage “longer than she normally does with the most distinguished artists.” The London Airport ruckus had made such an impression on the American TV host Ed Sullivan, who happened to be passing through, that he invited the band’s manager, Brian Epstein, to New York to discuss what would become a historic booking on his show. Epstein—significantly older, at twenty-nine, than his clients—didn’t share what the piece calls their distinctive “dishmop” haircuts, but he pronounced optimism about their upcoming trip. “I think that America is ready,” he said, “for the Beatles.” | 
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