By Edward Achorn

Forty years ago, on December 8, 1980, I was sitting in front of a computer in a newsroom, working on a story about a local meeting I had covered. A friend who knew I loved the Beatles yelled at me to check out the Associated Press alert.

“John Lennon wounded in New York shooting.”

Quickly, there was a follow-up: “John Lennon dead.”

I went home about 2 a.m. Then, finding it hard to do anything else, I got in my car, drove back to work, and wrote a column about what John Lennon had meant to me. It wound up on the front page.

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