Customer Reviews

Do You Want to Know a Secret?: The Story of the Official George Harrison Fan Club

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"Scan not a friend with a microscopic glass.
You know his faults, now let his foibles pass.
Life is one long enigma, my friend.
So read on, the anwer's at the end." -- George Harrison, 1975

This is the book Harrison/Beatle fans have long awaited. It is the keys to the kingdom of the Official George Harrison Fan Club and interesting information about George and his relatives.

Pat Kinzer has a wonderful writing style and an interesting history in re fame and the Sixties Scene. An avid fan of Annette Funicello, the most famous Mouseketeer in the 1950s, Kinzer soon graduated from the Mickey Mouse Club to attending "American Bandstand," (AB) a decades long running popular show featuring au courant artists and songs. By 1963, Kinzer is deeply involved with the then current rock and when AB stopped filming in Philadelphia, she is crushed. It is on AB where she met the original Mouseketeers and fully recognized her attraction to fame.

Thanks to AB, Kinzer discovered the Beatles. Two Beatle songs were played during a show she attended during the winter of 1963-64 and she became a raving Beatlemaniac, which is understandable. For the remainder of the decade, Kinzer and her various friends attended many concerts, including the Beatles' famous Shea Stadium concert on August 15, 1965. Her delightful anecdotes about the concerts and the friends she made during those formative years round out and fill out her accounts and make for some very interesting reading.

In 1964, Kinzer became an avid collector of things Beatle; she even started a George Harrison fan club! Her enterprise soon became a family business with her parents helping her print out her newsletter and sorting through her fan club mail. As a bonus Christmas 1964 present, she received a card from Louise & Harold Harrison Sr., who willingly answered questions their son's young fan asked. Before long, Kinzer had a regular correspondence with the senior Harrisons and made several trips to England throughout the late 1960s, after her 1966 graduation from high school.

From her small town Pennsylvania high school, Kinzer secured a job in an office at a local college where she worked for several years. She also met her then future husband there. She provides rich detail of the friends she made and kept along the way, including a pen pal in Germany named Marianne whom she corresponded with since 1966! They met in 1992 and traveled throughout Germany and England. The history and current picture of the former East Germany and the haunts the Beatles knew in Hamburg (West Germany) was very interesting.

Kinzer first met George Harrison in August of 1968 and several photographs she took of the youngest Beatle appear in this book. Readers are also treated to pictures of George's nephew and the senior Harrisons. She shares wonderfully friendly conversations she and her friends had with George and his awareness of her club. I love the parts about the senior Harrisons and other relatives, such as George's cousin Hilary and his siblings, nieces and nephews, including neighbors who knew George as a young boy. From all accounts, the Harrisons were quite loving and supportive and delighted in their son's talent and success.

Kinzer, always enterprising and resourceful sponsored several children during her 1964-72 creation of the Official George Harrison Fan Club. These endeavors proved fruitful as she sponsored two sisters in Liverpool and in Thailand. The girls in Thailand became the Club's sponsor children. After jumping through many legal hoops and cutting through long yards of red tape, Kinzer and her husband Tony raised Noi, the child who was the Club's sponsor child. Noi would later graduate from nursing school and, along with members of her family become part of Kinzer's growing, extended family. This was very heartwarming.

On a serious note, George's mother, Louise passed away on July 7, 1970 from a brain tumor. Kinzer rallies forward with words of comfort and raises money from Club members to donate money to the Clatterbridge Hospital in her memory. In July of 1971, the donation is made and Harold, Sr. gives this his blessing. Within one year, George would become upset as he feared Kinzer was taking people to the grave, thus upsetting the family privacy he cherished. According to Kinzer, George felt this was a form of exploitation. While those feelings are understandable, Kinzer made it plain that at no time did she ever provide any information about the resting place, which was best all around. Sadly, this fear George expressed led to an unfortunate falling out.

The Official George Harrison Club was dissolved in 1971-72. The irony of it all was that George signed a charter for the Club in 1966 and 1968; he initially gave the Club his blessing. Things started to go awry in 1968 when Kinzer received a Cease & Desist letter; by 1970, when the Beatles had disbanded, she was told to dissolve the Club as it was not part of the Beatles (USA) Ltd. Legal issues were trotted out; by 1971-72 the George Harrison Fan Club became history.

The crowning blow for Kinzer was when she sent out her final newsletter announcing that George's sister was moving to England. The newsletter was mailed to George's home as his sister did not leave the US for England; this allegedly upset George and Harrison, Sr. wrote Kinzer expressing his dismay over the club's dissolution and his concern that his son was being blamed for this. In his letter, Harold, Sr. expressed concern that Kinzer's newsletter was suggesting that George did not need his fans, which he said just wasn't so. It was during this time that the Harrisons no longer maintained contact with Kinzer, which embittered her. Her bitterness precluded her from enjoying the former Beatle's solo works; in an incredible show of irony in 1974, she attended the Dark Horse Concert. When the show ended, she saw George and Harold, Sr. on stage and reviled them from behind a curtain.

Despite these setbacks, Kinzer's growing extended family kept her from sinking completely into depression. Noi's successes, thanks in part to the Club and ties to old friends and people who, later in her life emerged as Beatle fans kept the spirit of All Together Now going. By the end of the book, Kinzer has reconciled her anger with George, which is in part the "secret" to which she refers. She reconnects with Lou, George's sister at Beatle conventions and, let's just say comes to a peaceful point in her Long & Winding Road.

I just love this book and cannot recommend it highly enough. It is power packed with George stories that any Harrison fan will love. Read on...The Answer's At the End.

This was a little tricky to rate. The writing was simple, but the author's experiences made up for it. Her parents had to be saints, taking her and friends to all these concerts and helping her with her fan club. They sounded like great people. The author had amazing access to George and his family. It certainly was a simpler time. George seemed like a complex guy. Very sweet on the one hand, paranoid about being used on the other. Once the Beatles legal battles began, the crankiness seemed to take over. When the Beatles broke up, the forced all official fan clubs to disband, which left a lot of hurt feelings. The author started this fan club on her own early on and was not a sanctioned fan club initially, but once things took off for the Beatles, she was required to join up. Then, she was forced to disband and it left her heartbroken and confused. Luckily, she has been able to move on with her life, but it took awhile. I would recommend this book for people who want a close up look at a George Harrison fan club or a nostalgic glance at a simpler time for music fans.

Very interesting to have the fan club story from a first generation person but there's a little too much gossip about other fan club reps for my tastes. Read it is you liked Apple Scruff Waiting For The Beatles.

I was a member of Pat Kinzer's fan club for George Harrison from 1968 to its demise in the early '70s. It was one of many Beatles fan clubs to which I belonged, in fact. But Kinzer's was one of the sharpest. The newsletters were better written than most, and the goodies available to members were interesting. Plus, she actually met Harrison a couple of times. What's more her club sponsored a child in Asia. So it was fun for me to read about how Kinzer started the club, how she met George and followed the Beatles and other groups of the era, and how the club met its sudden end, which Kinzer found it hard to forgive Harrison for. This book is a fun read for anyone who lived through that era.