The band's first televised performance was on People and Places. It was transmitted live from Manchester by Granada Television on 17 October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Art Roberts, music director of popular Chicago radio station WLS, placed "Please Please Me" into radio rotation in late February 1963, arguably the first time a Beatles record was heard on American radio.3 –Ron Price with thanks to internet site “beatles.startingiseasy.com.”

While Ringo was making his entry as drummer in the world of the Beatles, I was 18 finishing my adolescent baseball career pitching my last game against Oshawa in Ontario for the Burlington Juvenile All-Stars and finishing my summer job with the Dundas Confectionary Company. I was also just starting my most demanding academic year, grade 13 in Ontario and unobtrusively beginning my pioneer life for the Canadian Baha’i community. While the Beatles were going on TV for the first time in October 1962, as I say, the Cuban Missile Crisis was mounting to a fever-pitch and my society was as close to nuclear war as it would get in my adolescent and young adult life.

All these juxtapositions, societal crises, an incipient Beatlemania and a general sense of the transitions in my life, though, were unknown to me. I was at that time buckling down, settled into, the task of getting through nine subjects at Dundas District High School. I was in love with a girl in Michigan. In August 1962, just days before Ringo had his first session as the drummer for the Beatles, I had touched the warm skin of a girl’s breast for the first time in my life. I was living with my mother and father at 47 Tweedsmuir Avenue in Dundas, a small town in the Golden Triangle of southern Ontario. My mother was working in her last year of employment at McMaster University in the Overseas Students Department as a secretary. My father was 67, had just retired and in three years would die of an aneurism, a localized, blood-filled dilation (balloon-like bulge) of a blood vessel.

So much going on all around me, then
in that hot August of ’62 and an autumn
that took my world to annihilation’s edge
with Ringo getting a bigger break than he
then knew that summer and me getting a
bigger break than I knew at the time
pioneering for a Movement that had
just struck its head above the ground,
but with my mind and emotions filled
to overflowing with the first taste of
anything one could call romance and
nine subjects that would make or break
my academic life, my career and what
direction my life would take back then
when the world stood at oblivion’s edge.