24 years ago today. Wow.
I was only 5, so I don’t remember it myself. I’ve watched all the movies, and news clips, and read all the books about it.
But I want to hear your personal stories. Where were you when you heard the news? What else do you remember about December 8, 1980?
kindergarten
That was riveting, bienville.
Anyone else?
Years later I found out he was one of the Beatles.
Years after that I found out who the Beatles were.
Years after that a girl let me touch her boobs.
Who got shot in the what now?
Dude, I was a raving Beatles fan in the late 70s-early 80s. (Geek was written all over me.) When John got killed, I was 13 years old. When I got up for school that day, Mom (also a wild Beatles fan) looked as if she had been crying all night. She told me, and I laid on the couch for a while, crying over the famous dead guy as well as the fact that none of my eighth grade peers would even understand, let alone sympathize.
I was at home, watching Monday Night Football, when Howard Cosell announced Lennon had been shot. Two things about the event have always bugged me: that the guy who shot Lennon came from Atlanta, and that I had to find out about it from Howard Cosell. 
I was at Randwick races working as a penciller for one of the bookies in the paddock.
I was disc jockeying oldies at a swanky hotel. This was back when I was naive enough to have heroes, and John was mine. My boss came up and told me that he’d been killed. I put on “Imagine” and started to cry. I left the room, walked out of the hotel, got into a taxi and went home, and turned on the radio to see if it was true. It was. I sat there listening to the radio, in shock, and I cried and drank a bottle of really crappy champagne that my mother had for some reason, and later threw it up all over the place. It was a sad, sad day.
I was having dinner in my new apartment in Washington DC. I had prepared crepes with a creamed chicken filling.
I was living in the mountains in Nederland, CO and we were hanging at the local tavern. We decided to walk over to the other tavern, which was a couple blocks away. When I got in there, everyone was staring at the tv, looking like THEY had been shot…but it was John Lennon.
I don’t believe the death of any other celebrity has ever, or will ever, make me feel quite the way his death made me feel.
I didn’t hear it until the next morning (never watched the news on TV at that point).
My clock radio went off and there was all this talk – no music – about someone being killed. The DJ was talking about the shock, and the surprise, and how big a loss this was. After a few minutes of this, he finally mentioned who had died.
We heard about it on the radio, in the car the next morning. My mom was driving me to school - I must have been in 4th grade. She pulled the car over to the side of the road and cried for 10 minutes or so. I was really worried more about her than about Lennon; it was a pretty extreme reaction for her. I don’t remember any particular feelings about him or his death, more just fear about why my mom was so upset.
Maisy
University of Wisconsin Madison. Put the damper on my BD(7th BTW) celebration because my BF was a devoted Lennon/Beatle fan. That’s all he could talk about.
I was 17, in my kitchen - I remember it clear as day. I was going through a bad Ted Nugent phase while learning guitar, but had always had the Beatles as part of the soundtrack of my life and knew that John Lennon was the Man, in terms of leading the Beatles and just overall respect in the business. I was stunned.
I was a sophomore in college, serving pizzas to freshmen at a fraternity rush event, when one of my fraternity brothers came over with tears in his eyes and said that Lennon had been shot in front of the Dakota.
Me, too. I was living in Baltimore, working at a small ad agency at the time. I was sad but there were other celebs’ deaths that upset me a lot more (Divine, Gilda Radner, artist Richard Amsel).
My favorite (probably apocryphal) story: all night after the killing, Beatles fans gathered outside the Dakota, playing and singing Beatles songs. Finally, around 2:00 a.m., Lauren Bacall leaned out her window and screamed, “don’t you people have HOMES?!”
I was in college. I had gone to bed early, but my roommates were watching Monday Night Football. I heard them go nuts so I got up to see what happened and they told me the news. I couldn’t sleep afterwards.
I don’t remember where I was, or what I was doing. But I do remember that I heard it on the radio, and my first thought was that my Uncle Mike would be very upset. Uncle Mike was my teenage idol, and he had introduced me to the world of music beyond Donny Osmond.
I remember this so clearly. I was 10 years old and getting ready for school. We had the Today show on, as we always did and that’s how I found out. I was a fan of his new album at the time and I liked the Beatles, so I was really sad about it.
Later, on NBC news, we watched the fans with candles singing and crying and I got teary-eyed watching them because it was so moving.