My god, you guys are old. 
I was only five, so I don’t remember it either. While I am a fan, I rarely pay attention to the personal lives of most fans…
but to be honest, in 1980 I was just learning to speak English (had only come over the year before, and this was my first year in school) so I don’t think I would have paid attention anyway!
I was one day before turning 16, in my last year of high school in a podunk town. I’d gone to bed early the night before because I was feeling tired & run down.
My clock-radio alarm came on. I’m often a very slow waker, so I half-slept through the alarm for quite a while. For some reason, the DJs were doing some really bad joke routine about John Lennon being shot. As I slowly crept out of my sleep-stupor, I realized that they weren’t joking - it had actually happened.
I was stunned. I spent the entire day in a daze. Of course, in that cow-town, it was me and maybe three other students. No one else cared, many didn’t even know who he was. Several felt the need to make snotty comments about the Beatles, after asking why I was acting so strange. It was really awful.
I was 16 at the time but I don’t recall where I was when I heard the news. It obviously didn’t make much of an impact on me.
I was living at home and going to school. I was in my room. My mother knocked on my door and told me the news.
My mother had never cared much for the Beatles, but she was moved, possibly because of how sad I was. She seemed more confused than anything else – people of her generation were used to political leaders and dictators being assassinated, but… musicians?
Years later, I’m a little embarrassed at how hard it hit me. But my father had died nine days earlier – I was feeling pretty low.
Today, Lennon the person, with his well-intentioned but naive political beliefs and colossal ego doesn’t inspire the same admiration in me. I find his misogyny especially troubling.
But his death made it all the sadder that he seemed to be finally facing his flaws. In the final interview in Playboy, he said something remarkably honest and revealing:
“…I was a hitter… I hit women. That is why I am always on about peace, you see. It is the most violent people who go for love and peace… I am a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence… I will have to be a lot older before I can face in public how I treated women as a youngster.”
Putting aside his personal flaws, I still love his music as much as I ever did.
Lennon being shot was the first time I realized that there was such a thing as news. My parents were all sad that some guy who sang songs they liked died, and I was amazed that they found out from the TV. It took years before I figured out that my interpretation of what they said had happened (that he’d been stabbed by someone hiding in his bushes when he went outside) was a misunderstanding of what they said - else I didn’t know the different between shot and stabbed at that point… I wasn’t even four yet!
Listening to the radio in my room in our house in Gilbert, Arizona. Between songs, the DJ made the announcement. He sounded really bummed about it (understandably). For some reason, I felt kind of panicky. I rushed out to and down the hall. My dad was vacuuming tinsel from under the Christmas tree. I told him, he looked sad and said what a shame or something and went back to vacuuming. It still bums me out.
I was 19, a second-year student at the University of Virginia, in my Lambeth Field dorm room listening to the radio and in fact reading the PLAYBOY interview with Lennon that had come out a day or two earlier. I’d also bought “Double Fantasy” a day or two before.
Lennon was a pretty big deal to me at the time, and his death affected me the way JFK’s affected my elders’.
I was informed of Lennon’s assassination by Howard Cosell during the San Diego Chargers-Miami Dolphin Monday Night Football game. The whole thing was so surreal, I remember being more upset that the Dolphin’s went on to lose the game, than the fact that John Lennon was dead.
I was a freshman in high school. A friend of mine, another Beatles fan, called at night while I was asleep. The phone was in the hall outside my bedroom, so I heard my mother’s end of the conversation, and then when she hung up she said “it was Sarah. She said John Lennon died.”
So the next morning the clock radio comes on, and I was hearing the announcer, but I was still asleep and dreaming that I’d thought my friend’s call had just been a dream but here it was on the news, so it was real! And then I woke up all the way.
I was one of only a few Beatles fans in my high school, and a few of the more obnoxious folks asked why I wasn’t wearing all black, or told jokes like “What’s cold and clammy and wants to hold your hand?”
Woke up, got out of bed, turned on the radio, and heard the DJ say “We have more news about the death of John—” and for a second I thought he would say something about the Led Zeppelin drummer who had died several weeks earlier after an unfortunate encounter with a large quantity of vodka. When I heard “John Lennon” I yelled “What!”. I yelled “What?” again after the DJ said “They caught the guy who did it.” My mother heard me yelling and asked what was happening. I told her and she asked if he was the one who had been arrested for marijauna possesion in Japan a few months earlier.
I was in high school. A few kids joked about it. For my sister in middle school it was worse; she heard about it once she was already in the school classroom and she started crying. The other kids laughed at her and teased her by yelling “Bang Bang!” I was already home when she came back from school and she just asked “Is it true?”
“Yes” I told her. She ran to her room and sobbed.
I was working at Boeing building hydrofoils for the US Navy. About halfway through Stranglehold the DJ stopped the song and kept say “oh my God” over and over. He finally said that John Lennon had been shot but there was no word on his condition. About 15 minutes later he announced he was dead. The rest of the evening was rather surreal.