MORE THAN 100 OF JOHN MAZZIOTTA’S ‘DALLAS TIMES HERALD’ PHOTOS FEATURING THE BEATLES IN DALLAS 1964 ARE ABOUT TO HIT THE AUCTION BLOCK

The John Mazziotta Beatles-in-Dallas collection, which could be yours by the end of April 

(Heritage Auctions)

Jan Howes, who was 10 at the time but already deeply in love with the Beatles, did not see the band when it played Dallas on September 18, 1964, but her father did. It was, after all, his job: John Mazziotta was chief photographer at the Dallas Times Herald, assigned to cover John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr from Love Field arrival to Memorial Auditorium blastoff.

Mazziotta thought briefly of taking his daughter to the show, but reconsidered following news that girls, pressed against Cabana Motor Hotel plate-glass windows that eventually shattered, had to be hospitalized. “Dallas was another madness,” Harrison would recall years later, and Mazziotta wanted no part of that for his little girl, not so close to what had happened here just one year earlier.

“He felt really bad, but it was right after the Kennedy assassination,” Howes says now. “But I absolutely loved the Beatles. I’d gotten a transistor radio and was listening to them through that scratchy speaker, and I remember Ed Sullivan like it was yesterday. But after the incident at the Cabana, Dad said, ‘You’re not going.’ It really was unprecedented, and they may have been nervous after Kennedy, who knows. That was his excuse, anyway: ‘It’s too dangerous, no telling what could happen to you.’”

So instead Mazziotta gave his daughter quite the consolation price: every photo of the band and its fans he took during the Beatles’ one and only trip to Dallas 50 years ago, along with every negative — more than 100 all told.

“It was compensation for not getting to go,” she says, laughing. “No question he knew it was the biggest thing in my life and remained that way for just about forever.”

But now, as the 50th anniversary of that Memorial Auditorium concert approaches, Howes is willing to part with her father’s gift: One month from now Heritage Auctions will take her father’s photos and negatives to the Ukrainian Institute of America at The Fletcher-Sinclair Mansion and send them home with the highest bidder. The winner will take not only the photos, but the right to reprint and resell them.

Howes already knows what you’re thinking: But how could she …? The answer comes easy.

A rarely seen view of the Beatles playing Memorial Auditorium on September 18, 1964 (John Mazziotta/Heritage Auctions)

“My brother and I have had these photographers all these years, and they were something we could show off, and people would say, ‘Oh, those are wonderful.’ But beyond that, they were kinda …” She pauses. “Sitting there. In the past we made copies for ourselves, so we have a few of the ones we treasure. But with the 50th coming up, there’s that opportunity there may be some value here — not having any idea how much. But if there’s an opportunity for passing them on and letting someone else enjoy them rather than just my circle of friends, this is the time. The profit would be nice, I won’t lie to you. But they also deserve a new life.”

Howes sells the occasional print of her father’s work: Suitable-for-framing reproductions of Tom Landry, Roger Staubach and Byron Nelson portraits are available here. And, until the photos were sent to Heritage, some of the Beatles images were available as well, including this Love Field landing and another from the press conference.

But the entire collections reveals heretofore unseen gems, including several photos of the band on stage at Memorial. Those alone are hard to come by. Then there are the photos from the press conference, casual glances at bemused Beatles chatting up the locals who yukked it up like an audience well past its two-drink minimum. And among the negatives you will also find photos of fans pressed against chain-link at Love Field.

“My parents were both photographers,” says Jan, whose mother Peggie Spencer Mazziotta was one of the first female photojournalists at The Dallas Morning News, the Times Herald and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “This was second nature to them as photographers to get the story, and the story wasn’t just the object but what was sharing space with the object. It was important to convey that — how out of their minds the fans were. That’s the way they were as photographers, getting a sense of the environment and the emotion.”

Jan doesn’t know who will want the collection — maybe someone who was there and has spent 50 years chasing down memories, maybe a local history buff, maybe someone needed some photos for a book. She has her copies, and her memories. It’s time to let the hard copies go.

“You can hear my dad in the press conference,” Jan says. “He’s been gone 20 years, so it’s amazing to hear his voice: ‘I’m out of film,’ he says. There’s a lot of sentimental value to these photographs, and he recognized how important they were to me.”

But in the end, she says, her dad was a newspaperman. He wanted his work to be seen by an audience. “And now,” she says, “it’s time for them to begin that new life.”