Lennon assassination

It was 29 years ago tonight that former Beatle John Lennon was shot and killed outside the entrance to the Dakota apartment in New York. Mark David Chapman, who put the looney in looney-tune, had been stalking Lennon since October.

Earlier in the evening, he asked and received an autograph of Lennon's "Double Fantasy" album, as shown in the photo. A few hours later, at 10:50 p.m. EST, on Dec. 8, 1980, he shot him four times in the back. Lennon was pronounced dead 17 minutes later at a nearby hospital.

What stands out in my mind, and most who are old enough to recall what we were doing that night, was how America got the news. Talk about a different time. The majority of the country heard first from Howard Cosell, color commentator on "Monday Night Football." Cosell broke in with a bulletin he read from ABC News.

I was watching the game my senior year in college at the Centaur Apartments in Lubbock.

Can you imagine how if that had happened today how different it would have been? Would the first news have come from Twitter? Likely. CNN, Fox News and msnbc would have been a breakneck pace to get the story on the air, and they would have stayed on the air with it. How many websites would have popped in with the news? Too many to count probably.

Different world.