Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Next stop: 1964

If there is one thing I enjoy most about writing historical fiction, it's that it allows me to build a story around actual historical events and escape to another time.

The Mine examines life in the Pacific Northwest in the months leading up to the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. The Journey and The Fire do the same with the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens and the Big Burn of 1910, respectively. The Show captures Seattle in the weeks before and after the end of World War I.

The Mirror will follow a similar course. It will offer readers a snapshot of the pivotal, exhilarating year of 1964, with references to everything from civil rights, Barry Goldwater, and Vietnam to contemporary TV programs and the Beatles.

An entire chapter, in fact, will be devoted to the Beatles' concert on August 21, 1964, when the Fab Four played to 14,000 screaming fans in the Seattle Center Coliseum. The stop was the third on the band's twenty-six-city summer tour of North America.

This Sunday, CBS will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Beatles' iconic appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show with a live multimedia event. It will likely be the first of many glimpses of a year that changed the country. As a Baby Boomer and a fan of history and nostalgia, I look forward to them all.

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