Lada St. Edmund: She knew the Beatles when ...

"I was a very lucky little 17-year-old. I was in my last year of high school and pretty much from the Beatles to the Stones and just about everybody who was around passed by there. When they did 'Hullaballo, it was kind of a cross between 'Shindig' and really kind of a step up from 'American Bandstand.' It was a cross between that and the (Ed) Sullivan show. And so we got everybody from Sarah Vaughn to the Stones and the Turtles to everybody."

 

"Hullabaloo" ran from January, 1965 through August,1966 and Edmund, now 63, says she was with the show "pretty much the whole time it was on."  The show faced a lot of competition from other shows such as "Shindig," but Edmund says "Hullabaloo" had something that set it apart from the others.

 

"The difference between 'Hullabaloo,' 'Shindig' and all those other shows was we were all professional dancers. Most of us were from 'West Side Story.' I had done 'Bye Bye Birdie.' In fact, the choreographer was David Winters, who was one of the leads in 'West Side Story.' He was Baby John," she said.  

 

The Beatles never appeared on "Hullabaloo," but Edmund had contact with them through a magazine she worked for. "I used to write a column for a magazine called Hit Parader. I had entree into literally the day they stepped off the plane at Pan Am on the way to 'Ed Sullivan.' We just all kind of clicked. I got lucky."

 

She says that "before they went on the Sullivan Show, they were a little more accessible."

 

What was it like at the Sullivan show? "Nobody had ever seen anything like it. I suspect looking back that must have been a lot of very saavy hype because there were screaming kids and everything already there. Once they were on, it didn't matter" she says. "If you saw 'A Hard Day's Night' at the train station, that's pretty much how it was."

 

The Beatles were totally irreverent, she says. "They just didn't care. Elvis Presley was very careful about what he said. Fabian and all those people very careful about what he said. They (the Beatles) could care less. In fact, the more rude they came off the more we liked them. And that's what was so different about them. But they just said what was on their mind. Total irreverence."

 

Edmund says a New York PBS station has been talking about doing a retrospective of the "Hullabaloo" series, which was, at one time, on DVD.   

 

Dancing isn't the only thing Edmund has been known for. She was the first human to test the automobile airbag. "By 1974, Allstate Insurance and Eaton Industries wanted a human to test the airbag on national television. Me and my partner Hal Needham ("Smokey and the Bandit") took a car about the equivalent of 125 miles an hour into a 44-ton brick wall for a whole lot of money."

She and Needham later lobbied in Washington to ensure it was added to automobiles.