Photo by Daniel Olson DeeAnne Helfritz stands with a photo of The Beatles taken by the St. Paul Dispatch-Pioneer Press during their visit to Minnesota before their performance at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington on Aug. 21, 1965. Helfritz was 15 when she went with her friends, with tickets costing $2.50 to $5.50 per piece.

FAIRMONT – Today is the 60th anniversary of The Beatles’ lone visit to Minnesota, at the Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington on Aug. 21, 1965.

One Fairmont resident, Deeanne Helfritz, was there to witness it at 15 years of age. She said she had heard about the concert via word of mouth from her friends.

“I had many girlfriends who were into The Beatles at that time,” she said. “I’m sure one of them heard about it and said, ‘We should go. Let’s get tickets. Let’s go.'”

At the time, Helfritz lived in Austin, where she said The Beatles were beyond popular.

“They were the number one group,” Helfritz said. “Everyone was buying their music and listening to it and singing their songs.”

For Helfritz and her friends, The Beatles weren’t just the latest popular band; they were the people to be invested in and excited about.

“We were Beatlemaniacs to the nth degree,” she said. “We were such nerds. We knew their shoe sizes, we knew their girlfriends. We knew all that junk that meant so much to us.”

And so, a friend sent in for the tickets and received seven for the group. The tickets were divided, with five in one section and two in another. Helfritz said she agreed to be one of the two and was taken to the concert in her friend’s dad’s car.

“We sang all the way,” she said. “Probably drove him insane. Beatles songs all the way.”

This was way before CDs or any convenient portable music was available. While the radio played some Beatles songs, Helfritz said they knew all of them by heart anyway.

“You ran out and when the new release came, you bought the 45 (vinyl record) immediately,” she said. “Then, when everything was put onto an LP, you bought the album immediately.”

Helfritz painted a picture of what the scene looked like that day.

“Their stage was on the pitcher’s mound,” she said. “That’s where they built the stage. There was no seating like today, where they seat them on the field. It was all in the stands. Metropolitan Stadium was open-air so thank goodness it was good weather. I remember that our seats were not bad at all.”

Before the concert began, Helfritz said there was plenty to hear and see.

“There was a terrific amount of screaming going on,” she said. “Girls leaping over the side trying to get to the field and security guards tossing them back up into the stands.”

It was the first major concert she had ever been to. From the moment they entered the gates, she said the energy was palpable.

“Everybody was talking immediately when you got in there because they were excited about what was going to be happening, what they thought they were going to be seeing,” Helfritz said. Of course, when they came out, just this roar of everything. You couldn’t hear the person sitting next to you because it was so loud.”

The concert was around 30 minutes, during which they sang 11 songs. Helfritz said what she heard was a mixture of The Beatles singing and the crowd singing along.

There was an incident that Helfritz recalled happened after the concert.

“Someone yelled they saw one of the Beatles,” she said. “It was like a stampede of people. (We were) outside the gate, thank goodness, but you could hear this heavy sound of running going on.”

Her strong interest as a fan continued until she went to college. Of the four members, she said she mainly followed Paul McCartney’s music after she was no longer a Beatlemaniac. She even went to one of his concerts at Target Field in 2014, nearly 50 years after her first big concert.

In the days and months after the concert, Helfritz said having been able to go meant everything.

“Because then school started,” she said. “Bragging rights to [have been] able to see the Beatles. Kind of a ‘We were there and you weren’t.'”

Helfritz was able to keep in contact with two of her friends she went to the concert with. While one of them has died, Helfritz said she still talks to the other to this day.