EPHRATA - Sunday the United Stated looked back on 50 years of Beatlemania. The Beatles broke into the US scene with a television appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, and have been a crowd favorite ever since.

Lately, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, two of the original four members, played at the Grammys. Late members include John Lennon (1940-80) and George Harrison (1943-2001).

Jeff Gray, of Ephrata, remembers when it all started. In August 1964 he was in the Navy, stationed at Treasure Island, San Francisco, Calif.

He said his buddies were excited for a band playing in town. He had never heard of the band specifically, but knows he heard some of their songs on the radio, including early hits like "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" and "Please Please Me."

The show was at the Cow Palace in the City. "We were in the nosebleed section," he said, and could barely see the band, for the distance, and for the throng of girls screaming around the stage.

He and his buddies were dressed in uniform and tickets cost "a couple dollars," he said.

The noise was so loud he could barely hear the music.

"It was chaotic," Gray recalled.

"The stage was brightly lit," he said, and could make out the four musicians in "black suits and mop haircuts." John and George on guitar, Paul on bass and Ringo rocked the drums.

Gray was taking classes for nuclear engineering at the time, and had to go home right after the show to study for tests in the morning.

Gray and some buddies rented an apartment a couple blocks off Haight and Ashbury part-time, when they weren't living on base.

"It was a place for people to gather if they wanted to go party, basically and to be among the in-crowd, which that area of San Francisco was becoming," he said.

Haight and Ashbury is a cross street that makes up the heart of a San Francisco neighborhood made famous for the hippies that began moving there about 1967, Gray said.

The Beatles and San Francisco eventually became associated with a drug culture, including the use of marijuana and LSD. Gray could neither "confirm nor deny" using the drugs of that time.

Sundays at the Gold Gate Park, close to where he lived, Gray would spend his afternoons picnicking and watching unknown musicians including Janis Joplin and Grace Slick, lead singer for Jefferson Airplane, and Country Joe and the Fish.

At the time, the 'Beatniks' were still loitering those streets, Gray said. It was the Beatniks that eventually became the hippies, he said.

After living there for a couple months, Gray was sent on his first tour to Vietnam. He earned an Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal for being part of one of the first Navy units to go there. "We were not even in a shooting war with them yet," he said.

In the beginning, his unit was there to scope out the situation on a destroyer ship much like the USS Maddox. The attack on the Maddox was the event that drew the US into the Vietnam War, Gray said.

For the next tour and a half Gray completed in Vietnam, he was involved mostly in search and rescue efforts, he said.

Gray said during those early years of Beatlemania he was not a huge fan nor followed their career closely. He said it was only toward the end of the band's career that he "really got into them."

"Sometimes it seems longer, sometimes it seems like yesterday," Gray said. He likened the time of the Beatles' show with his time in Vietnam.

Gray's favorite Beatles albums are "Rubber Soul" and "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," he said.

Gray also has audio tapes of a Beatles recording session in Japan, acquired through a "friend of a friend of a friend."

He said his daughter, Rachel Grubb, and Leah Roberts, both of Ephrata, also enjoy listening to The Beatles. He said one day Rachel came home and raved about a band she heard, and, did they know of The Beatles? Gray said he got out all his old records to share with her. Rachel was in junior high or early high school, he said.

The Beatles continue to move and groove with younger generations, Beatlemania continues 50 years later.

Why?

"I think it's because their music is still professional, the same way we still listen to Mozark and those guys. It's very complex music, and they were good at it," Gray said.

"Plus the fact, coming from those days it was a rebellion, so it was a way to think, and people still think that way."