I was in the UW Daily newsroom that Monday night when the first bulletins came in on the already-archaic AP teletype machine, reporting first that John Lennon had been shot, then that he had died.

Within minutes, every radio station that even half-claimed to play rock music, and many that didn’t (in commercial radio, remember, this was the nadir of the soft rock era), went to all Lennon/Beatles and stayed that way for the next day or longer. I remember going up two flights of stairs in the Communications Building to the studios of KCMU (KEXP’s precursor), to hand deliver copies of the wire reports to the DJ on duty.

This was one month after the election of Ronald Reagan, the moment many of us campus libs feared would bring the beginning of the end of progress and democracy in America. (Turns out the only thing my more cynical/fearful lefties had wrong about that was how slow the nation’s fall from middle-class economic security would be.)

Then, with the assassination of the man who’d done as much as anyone to “invent” rock n’ roll as people my age had known it, it seemed to some of us like the end of the world.

But life, as Lennon himself had sung, went on.

As it will after all of us have left its stage.