They screamed together as teens at The Beatles' 1964 Milwaukee show. At 75, their love for the band is still an adventure

GREEN BAY - There’s not the screaming and crying there was on that Friday night of a lifetime in 1964, but get Bonnie Howe, Loine Hockman, Judy Urban and Karen Konopka talking about The Beatles and they’re still the giddy school girls they were back then.

Even something as simple as spelling their names aloud gets a giggle.

“K-O-N-O-P as in Paul,” Konopka says, with extra emphasis and a grin.

“Oh, a lefty ... just like Paul,” someone else says when they notice the reporter trying to keep pace with them is left-handed.

The Paul in question, of course, is Paul McCartney — or “Paul McCorny,” as Urban’s grandson likes to tease her.

McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison have been been the joyful thread running through the four women’s friendship since they were juniors at Hartford Union High School in Hartford and saw the British band play its only Wisconsin concert at Milwaukee Arena on Sept. 4, 1964.

It was the year Beatlemania swept America, and they can still feel the rush.

“We really didn’t hear any of the songs, because we were screaming the whole time,” Howe said. “And everyone else was, too.”

“I cried the whole bus ride home, because I was never going to see Paul McCartney again,” Urban said.

When they turned 70, they decided to reward their decades-long love affair with The Beatles by taking a trip together to Liverpool for the International Beatleweek Festival. Not missed connecting flights, lost luggage or an unexpected hospital visit could take away from the thrill of traveling down Penny Lane, seeing the church hall where McCartney and Lennon first met and finding the Eleanor Rigby headstone.

This year they all turn 75, so they gathered up their Beatles scrapbooks, magazines, photographs, newspaper clippings, buttons, CDs and bubblegum trading cards and booked a few days at Abbey Road Green Bay, a charming Beatles-themed Airbnb not far from Lambeau Field. Just the place to “Come Together” and “Get Back” all in the same August weekend.

Howe came from Star Prairie, Hockman from Ripon, Urban from Wauwatosa and Konopka from North Shores, Michigan. Their “plus one,” longtime school friend Donna Kauper, who made the pilgrimage to Liverpool with them, came from Allenton.

They spent their first night together watching Ron Howard’s 2016 documentary, “The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years.” The memories and laughter came in equal measure the next morning as they gathered around the kitchen table to talk about how much those “cheeky” lads from Liverpool have meant to them.

It was a $4.50 ticket and $1 chaperoned bus ride to Milwaukee Arena

They’re not sure how it happened, but for as long as they can remember, they each have adopted one of the Fab Four’s identities. Their personalities might have something to do with who is who.

Hockman is George, who was known as the quiet one in the band. “That’s me,” she said. “And I thought he was the cutest.”

Howe is Ringo, also a little more on the quiet side and the last one to join the group. She makes an observation about their noses, but then her inner Beatle thinks better of it and she asks for it to be scratched from the record.

Konopka is John, considered the intellectual one and the leader. Her friends say that fits her.

Urban is Paul. “I just loved him,” she said.

In school, they called each other by their Beatles names. They signed their yearbooks that way and the letters they wrote one another during summer vacation, too. They were known as “the crazy Beatles girls” in their class.

They tried and tried to get tickets to the band’s Milwaukee Arena concert but without any luck — until a girl who was a grade ahead of them made their day. Her dad had a connection to Hartford radio station WTKM and was able to get tickets. She knew how much they loved The Beatles and offered them the chance to buy four. Cost: $4.50 each.

“That was a lot of money for us,” Hockman said.

They were all country girls. None of them grew up with money.

“Now you can’t buy a cup of coffee for that at Starbucks,” Konopka said.

They paid another $1 to ride a chaperoned school bus from Hartford to downtown Milwaukee and back home again. They’re fairly certain that’s the only reason their parents ever let them go.

“I had to promise my dad that I would never play another Beatles record. That he would never have to hear another Beatles record,” Konopka said. “Of course, that got broken right away.”

“My parents thought it strange when I was screaming at the TV or Ed Sullivan, but they never really said, ‘Oh they’re terrible.’ They were perplexed, I think,” said Hockman, who doesn’t recall having to beg her parents to go to the show.

“Little did they know or maybe even we know that it would be such a defining moment in our lives to say we were at The Beatles,” Urban said. “I mean, they only came to Milwaukee once.”

They were among 12,000 in attendance that night, off to the side of a modest stage on McCartney’s side. It was a quick 30-minute set. They couldn’t hear a thing for all the screaming. Some girls were treated for fainting and hysteria.

“Thousands Sob, Yell at Arena: BEATLES CONQUER CITY!” proclaimed the headline across the front page of the Milwaukee Sentinel the next day. Konopka has a yellowed copy of the paper and even took it along with her to Liverpool.

“I probably cried the most,” Urban said. “It was an overwhelming experience. You wait and wait and wait and wait and wait for the day to come, and it’s there, and in the moment you probably don’t even appreciate it as much you should, and then it was all over. Thirty minutes.”

For their 75th birthdays, a surprise photo from their past

But it really does seem like yesterday every time the four of them get together or remember one another on their designated Beatle’s birthday or whenever Konopka texts the group a Beatles-related tidbit from the “Today in History” column in the Detroit Free Press.

They still pinch themselves that Tony Bramwell was part of their private tour group in Liverpool. A friend of The Beatles who worked with them at Apple Records, they had the chance to ask him all kinds of question over lunch. Urban (remember now, she’s Paul) asked about McCartney’s marriage to Linda. He told her that of all The Beatles, he never would have cheated on his wife.

“He was no George,” someone cracks and they all break into laughter.

Konopka and Urban both still have their ticket stubs from the Milwaukee concert, but only Urban bought the original program from that night.

“None of them remember it and mine fell apart, but they said I must’ve had the money to buy one. And this is just terrible, but inside the program they called them the wrong names,” she said.

For their 75th birthdays, Kauper surprised them during their stay in Green Bay with a photo she took of the four of them a year or so after the show.

As high school students, they were allowed to go by bus to the Milwaukee Sports Show at Milwaukee Arena. Those crazy Beatles girls had the idea to duck out from all the hunting and fishing exhibits and sneak into the darkened part of building where the concert had been. They weren’t supposed to be in there — not like them at all, they insist — but they couldn’t resist the chance to sit in their same seats from the concert. They asked Kauper to take the photo.

She has had it all these decades in a self-stick photo album. Prying it loose to have copies made was a lesson in patience but what a keepsake.

“She documented a moment that we couldn’t remember. To me, it was very Twilight Zone (seeing that photo). I was young,” Konopka said. “It was very special.”

Their love for The Beatles is about more than just the music

They’re grandmothers now, but the teenage girls who were so into rock ‘n’ roll in the ’60s and were regulars at all the dances are still young at heart and hip to what’s happening.

They might laugh at one another when they try to pronounce Eminem and admit they’d be sunk if hip-hop was a “Jeopardy!” category, but Urban and Konopka would put their combined Beatles trivia skills up against anyone.

They get their Beatles music fix these days on Spotify and Channel 18 on Sirius XM Radio. They’re still going to concerts — Gladys Knight, Lyle Lovett, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Urban has seen McCartney every time he has played Wisconsin, including his 2019 concert at Lambeau Field.

“None of us are five people who have just sat in our chairs and grown old,” Urban said.

Just as The Beatles have proven timeless, so has their love for the band. Ask them why they adore the band so and you get a flurry of answers.

“They were poor boys,” Howe said. “They weren’t rich kids who had a lot, so I think we identified with that maybe a little bit.”

“They looked like they were having such a great time. They were friends,” Hockman said. “Every song seemed unique. Every song, you wondered how did they do it. How did they come up with new melodies?”

“And their haircuts at the time were considered really long and radical,” Urban said, “and that was just kind of appealing.”

“And they were cheeky,” Konopka throws in.

Never underestimate cheeky.

The women have no doubt they’d still have been lifelong friends even without their Beatles bond. When Hockman ended up in the emergency room in Liverpool, Howe, who was a nurse, missed out on seeing McCartney’s house on the tour to stay with her.

Friends first, fans second.

“These are really special people,” Konopka said.

If it was Liverpool or bust for their 70th birthdays and an Airbnb with a shower made to look like McCartney inside a British red phone booth for their 75th, what adventure awaits down the long and winding road for their 80th?

“Talk to us in five years,” Konopka said.

SUPPORT LOCAL JOURNALISM: Our subscribers make this coverage possible. Click to see the Green Bay Press Gazette's special offers at greenbaypressgazette.com/subscribe and download our app on the App Store or Google Play.

Kendra Meinert is an entertainment and feature writer at the Green Bay Press-Gazette. Contact her at 920-431-8347 or kmeinert@greenbay.gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter @KendraMeinert. 

This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Beatles show in Milwaukee in 1964 was a seminal moment for 4 friends