As fans prepare to gather in Central Park to remember ex-Beatle and pacifist John Lennon, gunned down 25 years ago today outside his Manhattan home, Fred Fogo's students at Salt Lake's Westminster College will congregate in his classroom as usual.
Only today, students may hear an expert's take on the slaying that marked the end of an era — however brief it may be.
Fogo is a communication professor and author of the book "I Read the News Today: The Social Drama of John Lennon's Death." While he says the book's subject matter is not part of his regular lessons — he sticks mainly to journalism — today, the quarter-century marker of Lennon's death, he'll probably make an exception.
"I may say a word or two."
On Dec. 8, 1980, Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, were returning home from a recording studio to the Dakota apartment building about 10:50 p.m. The couple exited a limousine, and Lennon, who two months prior celebrated his 40th birthday, was shot four times and killed.
The gunman was Mark David Chapman, to whom Lennon had given his autograph hours earlier. At the time of the murder, Chapman carried with him a revolver and a copy of J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye," which he called his "statement." He remains behind bars.
Fogo remembers casually watching TV when Howard Cosell announced Lennon's death during Monday Night Football.
"It's like one of those things, (how) you remember where you were when John F. Kennedy was assassinated," Fogo said. "I was quietly stunned. But again, it was a story we'd heard before: Kennedy, Kennedy, King . . . (and) the lone, deranged assassin."
Indeed, Fogo was a man of the '60s counterculture era. He spent time in the hippie-magnet Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the summer of 1967.
"I was right there in the middle of it," Fogo said. "I always wanted to try and make sense of it in some ways."
Fogo, who says he's more of a Bob Dylan man than Beatles fan, got his chance to analyze the abstract counterculture in his University of Utah doctoral dissertation. Lennon, he determined, provided the perfect springboard.
"His death did in a lot of ways mark the death of the '60s," Fogo said.
It coincided with the presidential election of Ronald Reagan, who Fogo notes was at war with the counterculture in his days as California governor. It also came as the generation was entering the age group of its own mistrust.
"One of the rallying cries was, don't trust anyone over 30. The problem with that is, you get to be 30, and you get to be 40, and you can't live in that world forever," he said. "Lennon's death became a flashpoint for this huge generational reflectiveness of what has happened to those values, and where are we now in our life paths."
Perhaps those gathering in the "Strawberry Fields" area of Central Park — as they have every Dec. 8 since Lennon's death — will share such reflection.
Ono was not expected to comment or make an appearance today — she traditionally spends the anniversary meditating in the Dakota apartment building, where she still lives, The Associated Press reported. She and her son, Sean, who was 5 when his father was killed, also typically place candles on their Dakota windowsill in support of the fans' gathering.
Fogo also will pause to remember Lennon.
"I remember in reading some of the things after his death, and one of the writers said, Lennon would have made a wonderful old man. I think of that," Fogo said. "I think he would have been delightful at 65. I think he would have been as provocative and funny — he had a great sense of humor.
"I think he would have been a wonderful old man."
E-mail: jtcook@desnews.com