Wed 10/20 @ 7PM
Forty-seven years ago, when she was a 16-year-old Claveland Heights high school student, Jan Mitchell and a friend attended the Beatles concert at Public Hall. The next day, the duo boarded for London where they hoped to encounter the Beatles in person.
They didn’t, but they had three weeks of adventures, diving into the city’s burgeoning night club music scene and meeting young musicians and scenesters, before they were caught and shipped back to Cleveland where an angry, showboating judge used their case to ban rock concerts from Cleveland (temporarily, obviously).
But the trip gave Mitchell a vision of a bigger, better future than she could see from her abusive childhood and led her to New York and a career as a federal investigator. She tells the whole story in her book, My Ticket to Ride: How I Ran Away to England to Meet the Beatles and Got Rock and Roll Banned in Cleveland, was recently published Cleveland imprint Gray & Co.
Now Mitchell herself, living back in Cleveland after many years in New York, is making the rounds, talking about her book. She’ll be the guest of the Cedar/Coventry Reading Series, hosted by the Cleveland Heights-University Heights Library’s Coventry branch. Go here to register.