General Admission
The Beatles came to the Sam Houston Coliseum in August 1965. I was eleven. Tickets were five dollars for general admission. There was an afternoon and an evening show.
Five dollars was a lot of money and we just didn't have it to spare. Neither my mother nor my grandmother had jobs. My best friend already had a ticket. Both of his parents worked so $5 was doable for him.
But I was quite desperate to go, so I tried to win my ticket from the sponsoring radio station. The local AM radio station had a contest, first caller wins, that sort of thing. I tried and tried to win, calling time after time, but no luck.
The concert was getting close and I had no ticket. The Beatles were very important to me when I was eleven.
My grandmother, “Mom”, entered contests and drawings as a sort of hobby I guess, but she also looked for wherever there was an opportunity to get something for free. But never because it was from a charity. There must have been some sort of welfare program back then but Mom would not have done that. But winning it, that was ok, as then it was about opportunity, cunning and luck.
The cunning was about stuffing the box. Most drawings allowed entering the contest as many times as one wanted, so that was ok.
She'd come home with a full pad of entry forms and have me and Mother fill them out with our name, address and phone number.
And she was remarkably lucky. I remember once she brought home a two-holstered cap-gun set when I was younger. She'd won a turkey for more than one Thanksgiving.
Mom came home from the store the Saturday one week before the big event and put on the table in front of me two General Admission tickets for The Beatles evening concert. Unbeknownst to me, as she didn’t want to get my hopes up, she had secretly entered a drawing for tickets at one of the grocery stores and my mother's name was drawn.
Since my best friend already had a ticket to go, I gave one to a cousin who was two years older than me. My aunt gave him $5 to spend at the concert on whatever might be for sale. We each got a "program" which was a record album sized magazine of Beatles pictures. It cost two dollars. I was stunned that spending $2 on something was ok.
The first song was “Twist and Shout”, after that I don't know because the screaming was so loud I couldn't hear the music.
The concert lasted 45 minutes.
I still have that program.