“I wish I
had brothers and sisters,” little Richy complained. “There’s nobody to talk to
when it’s raining.” If that had been the worst problem this little boy had when
he was growing up, his childhood would have been most uneventful.
Sadly, he
was ill so much of his young life that other children called him “Hospital Boy”
and “Lazarus.” He had been healthy the
first years of his life, but when he was six in 1947, he developed
appendicitis. An ambulance raced him to the children’s hospital, but it was too
late—His appendix had burst, and he had developed peritonitis, a potentially fatal inflammation of the abdominal lining.
Three times
that night the doctors told his mother Elsie he would not live until dawn. For the
next few days he went in and out of a coma. In fact, for the next four months
he continued to go in and out of consciousness.
To help the
stitches heal, the doctors and nurses ordered him to lie still in bed. He hadn’t
yet learned to read or write. The boredom was excruciating. Then one day while
trying to play with another child, he fell out of bed. His stitches ripped open, lengthening
his hospital stay into 1948.
In the Dingle
In the Dingle
By summer
Richy was home, but he had fallen far behind in school. His teachers ignored
him. He would never catch up and, as a result, never learned to spell and wrote
words phonetically. He rarely read anything besides comic books.
Then when he was 14 in 1954, ill
health befell him again. He developed pleurisy, an inflammation of the lining
of the chest around the lungs. After 10 weeks in the hospital, his doctors
diagnosed tuberculosis. It was likely caused by the foul air pollution in his
town and the close and damp living quarters in the Dingle, the slum where
he lived. He would stay in a sanitarium through most of 1955.
From time to time, teachers came in. He
learned crafts such as basket making and knitting. One day a music teacher came
in with assorted percussion instruments. She quickly learned that Richy
wouldn't take part unless she gave him a drum to play.
The sanitarium allowed the children
to watch television for an hour a day. One evening Richy saw a drummer on a variety
show twirl his drumsticks. “Wow! Look at this man,” he said. “Twiddling the
sticks!”
When he was released, he went back
to school but only to pick up a document certifying his eligibility for the
dole, unemployment money from the government. Getting the school to give him
that piece of paper was problem, too. He’d been there so rarely, it had a hard
time finding any record he'd ever attended.
He was homely looking and
weak from his medical woes, which had left a grey streak in his hair above his
left ear.
“I'm quite happy inside,” he said. “It's just the face won't smile.” The Dingle was rough. Most teens were in gangs. "You kept your head down, your eyes open,
and you didn't get in anybody's way,” he said.
"Drive 'em all mad"
"Drive 'em all mad"
Richy was good at running away, not
fighting. “I got beaten up a few times,” recalled. “It's that terrible craziness,
that gang situation, where, if you're not fighting an outsider, you get crazy
and start fighting amongst yourselves, like mad dogs.”
He spent his days idling about.
He sang in a church choir. He wasn’t strong enough to work at a job bundling
newspapers. He couldn't pass the physical exam to
become a railway worker and was laid off. He found work as a waiter on ferry
but quit fearing that he might be drafted and the navy would think he was fit
for sea duty. Finally, he got a job as an apprentice metalworker, joined
a union, learned how to use a lathe.
With what spare change Richy had, he bought a 50-inch diameter bass drum from a
junk store, and he delighted in playing it on family occasions. “Used to drive 'em all mad,” he recalled.
Perhaps
because he lacked physical strength, he compensated by developing a flamboyant
style. For his sixteenth birthday his mother gave him a signet ring. Then he
got an engagement ring from a girlfriend. When his grandfather died, he started
wearing his wedding ring, and, finally, for his twenty-first birthday his
mother gave him another ring. People started calling him Ringo.
Tomorrow
never knows, and soon thereafter and for eight days a week for most of the
1960s, with a little help from his friends, he became the most well-known
drummer in the world in the most famous band in the world. He knew how to make the other guys in the band laugh. They became the brothers he never had.
"The feel I have…that just
comes from God,” Ringo once said. “I truly believe that my heartbeat keeps the
tempo, because I naturally have great time….I just have great time, and that’s
the rhythm of my heart and my soul."
For Ringo Starr, nothing came easy.
As he wrote in a song, “Got to pay your dues if you wanna
sing the blues, and you know it don't come easy….Remember—peace is how we make it. Here within your reach,
if you're big enough to take it.”
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