BURIEN, Wash. — At the Highline Heritage Museum you might run into D-B Cooper, get up close to a prehistoric sloth, or if you're lucky meet a man who can tell you the exact date he found his life's passion.
Aug 25 1966 was the day the Beatles played two shows at the Seattle Coliseum when Kurt Howard was 12-years-old.
“I wanted to go with some friends of mine and they didn't want to pay 4 dollars for a ticket," said Howard. "So my parents dropped me off and I went by myself. You couldn't hear them with all the screaming girls but it was still worth it. George Harrison was playing and he went ‘Yaaaaah!!’"
With his purchase of a ticket and the concert program Howard started a Beatles collection that has been a lifetime in the making.
“I just can't help myself you know,” Howard said. “I’m a Beatles fan forever.”
Albums, CDs, books, magazines, stamps, cards and even a very worn-out Beatle boot make up his collection. Howard even has a picture of him and his wife in the Beatles' room at the Edgewater Inn. The bottom of the picture includes a photo of The Beatles fishing out of the window of that very room.
“Yeah the memories I just can't get rid of those things - I just love looking at them,” Howard said.
Howard is still enraptured by the album covers the way he was all those days ago.
“What's interesting about this [The Beatles ‘Help’ cover] is the Beatles do not spell ‘help’- they spell ‘NUJV,’” Howard said.
There is even clue that seems to prove that Paul was replaced by a barefoot look-alike on the “Abbey Road” album cover. “He's barefoot because he's dead,” Howard said.
Everything in the exhibit transports Howard back to that fateful day in 1966.
“And I can remember when they're getting ready to open the door for the concert and everybody's pushing forward,” Howard said. “You could almost lift your feet up because just the compression of all those people it's like WOAH you know?”
That was the day Howard saw the Beatles - even if he couldn't really hear them.
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