The Back Page The Sergeant Pepper’s patch

I suppose that’s why going to Beatlefest in Secaucus every year since the 1970s became a ritual, even though after Frank’s death in 1995, it was impossible for the four of us to attend.

Yet Beatlefest had a longer and richer history than I expected, reaching back into the roots of our past without my being aware of it.

Mark Lapidos, the founder of Beatlefest 30 years ago, was the manager of Sam Goody in Garden State Plaza Mall when we shopped there in the late 1960s. Sam Goody was a whole different store then, a Mecca for musicians and music lovers of every ilk, a place so stuffed with the peripherals of musical paraphernalia that people flocked to it to find the oddest of items. We hunted down rare singles in its aisles or sheet music to rock tunes no other store provided.

It was to this Sam Goody that Frank and I went seeking to find a cloth patch that modeled the cardboard version issued with the Beatles Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club album in 1967.

This patch, which we put on our denim jackets, became our trademark, the symbol of our membership into a private Beatles Club. The four of us wore it religiously, at least until we grew too old and began to see such things as a little silly.

I didn’t think the patch was so silly when I saw at the 1995 Beatlefest, two pale patches seemingly ignored in a Beatlefest market area where other Beatles items such as Beatles lunch boxes, Beatles posters, coasters, paintings and buttons seemed to draw much more attention. Frank had died a few days before, and three remaining members of our troop felt particularly bad, just as struck by this tragedy as when John Lennon died in 1980.

This vendor hadn’t thought anyone would want the item, and drew out the two patches from a yellowed wax paper envelope, patches that had been stored away at some previously remote moment and not thought of since. I wanted four, but two was all he had, and he gave them both to me for two dollars each – which would have been a bargain even in 1967.

Later, at Frank’s wake, I handed one to Garrick. He had looked so despondent over Frank’s death, I thought the patch would cheer him a little, but he only stared down at it laying in the palm of his hand, his face showing the same sequence of memory mine must have when I first saw them again, and his eyes registering the same pain realizing that – like the real Beatles – our Fab Four was now missing one member.

Because of my job, I couldn’t get to Frank’s funeral the next day, but Garrick later told me he was the last person with Frank’s body before the funeral home people closed the casket, and just before they sealed Frank in that box in preparing to bury him, Garrick slipped the Sergeant Pepper’s patch into the dead man’s pocket.

In the years that followed, I made a point of looking for additional patches each time I came to the Beatlefest, and over the years, I found none. Perhaps I looked in the wrong places. Perhaps I asked vendors who specialized in other areas.

This year, Garrick and I wandered through the marketplace, Garrick in search of some gifts for a cousin who had a birthday that week, and me, looking for compact discs to replace albums now out of date. I didn’t expect to find the patch, and didn’t believe it when I saw it.

This was a newer issue, posted on a board along with other items such as a patch depicting a yellow submarine. Yet, it was modeled after the same patch I had purchased in 1995, and the patches the four of us had worn in 1967. And fittingly, the vendor had only one left.

Later, as we traveled through the rest of the event, listening to the a pickup band on the second floor playing Beatles tune after Beatles tune, after we looked over the Beatles museum, the Beatles clothing, the Beatles Trivia contest, and before we sat down to listen to Beatles promoter Sid Bernstein – there to promote his new book Not Just the Beatles – I slipped that patch into Garrick’s pocket, knowing how he would feel finding it when he got home. – Al Sullivan