He was just Louise Caldwell’s skinny little brother, a 20-year-old with a weird haircut, who said he played the guitar and sang a little, and was gaga for American cars, especially ones with tail fins. In America, no one knew who George was or cared. His two weeks there, starting on September 16, might have been the last carefree moments of an increasingly hectic, difficult and arguably tragic life. George chose to visit his sister, in Benton, Illinois (pop. Needing a break from touring and recording, in September Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr visited Greece. For the first time in their young lives, the four working-class boys who’d grown up in a bombed-out city had money, and demands on their time were piling up. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” would be released in November, and by December, the Beatles would have released four singles and two albums, all while appearing regularly on the BBC and playing almost 200 concerts in 1963 alone. Screaming girls were fainting at their performances. That summer, the four of them had moved from Liverpool to a hotel in London’s upscale Bloomsbury neighborhood. The Beatles’ first LP, “Please Please Me,” had been released the previous March, and the single “She Loves You” had come out in August. In September 1963, almost no one in America had heard of the Beatles, much less of George Harrison, their quiet lead guitarist. So, later that day, Chris and Monty went to Skaggs Electric Supply Company, which sold records alongside light bulbs and extension cords, and asked the proprietor if he had anything by a band called the Beatles. Louise said George was in a band back in England, where he lived. “If you didn’t go the barbershop once or twice a month,” Chris adds, “you were a poor person.” “That was the most generous explanation we could come up with, though with that hair, you kind of wanted to give him some money to see a barber.” “Chris and I figured that George ripped his jeans on that camping trip,” Monty Field says. Its vistas were unlike any George would have seen in England: sandstone bluffs rising incongruously above almost endless stretches of flat farmland. The campground was part of the Shawnee National Forest in southernmost Illinois, bordered by the Ohio River to the east and the Mississippi to the west.
They had been camping the night before, Louise said, at Garden of the Gods, about 22 miles southeast of Harrisburg. “Most of the boys at that time had flattops.” George was wearing jeans, he noticed, with a hole at the knee. “He had a funny haircut, kind of long and stringy,” Monty recalls. Louise did most of the talking, but the younger of the two brothers, whose name was George, made an impression all the same.
She was there with her children and two brothers. As 40 marching units, some in their characteristic fezzes, came down the street, Chris and Monty engaged in conversation with a striking blonde in her early 30s who spoke with an English accent. By some accounts, 12,000 people had gathered for the festivities, even though the population of this farm town was only about 9,000. On a late summer afternoon more than half a century ago, Chris and Monty Field, teenage brothers, found a spot on the courthouse square in Harrisburg, Illinois, to watch a Shriners parade.
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