“I had gone to pick up a friend at the Boston House on Circuit Avenue in Oak Bluffs.”

Bonnie McElaney Menton has a clear recollection of an evening forty years ago. “My friend Jackie said, ‘John Lennon is here.’ We ran over to his car, parked right there on Circuit Avenue. It was a Maserati with the door that rose up. We poked our heads in the passenger-side window, where he was sitting. ‘I can’t believe you’re here,’ Jackie said. ‘We’ll give you a tour of the Island.’”

It was September 15, 1975, just weeks before John Lennon’s son Sean was born. Bonnie continues: “We were in the process of moving from a cabin in the woods to a big old sea captain’s house in Vineyard Haven. We parked his Maserati there, as it was so conspicuous, and we took him on a tour in my friend Jackie’s big Buick Skylark. We stopped at the cabin in West Tisbury, where our three-legged Irish setter came out to greet us. There was a hatchet on a stump. John Lennon looked at the hatchet and the three-legged dog and said, ‘What are you, the Manson girls?’”

Lennon offered to take the girls to dinner at Shiretown in Edgartown. The girls were waitresses at the Colonial Inn and the Harborside, and “word spread quickly through the working community: ‘We’re going to dinner with John Lennon.’”

“I remember it was Yom Kippur because Judy said, ‘I can’t eat, I’m fasting,’ and I said, ‘You have to order something. John Lennon is taking us to dinner.’” She explains, “We were all trying to be cool. We tried to seem like it was not a big deal, but we were like in shock. It was hard to know how to act. We were shy, but he put us at ease and it was comfortable, but there were moments of unease.”

One girl said Lennon looked just like his photographs. He replied, “Don’t you?”

The girls drove to Menemsha to see the sunset. Lennon said Martha’s Vineyard reminded him of Scotland. Back at the sea captain’s house, the girls offered Lennon a bedroom with a sleigh bed and a chenille bedspread, and he went to bed.

“Jackie couldn’t believe he was really here, so she knocked on his door, opened it and said, ‘I just came to wish you good night.’ Lennon, wrapped in his bedspread, came out and said to us, ‘Someone just woke me up to say goodnight.’” Bonnie continues: “We three girls, Jackie, Judy and me, sat up talking with John Lennon until it must have been two in the morning. He said it reminded him of a Scottish girls school.” Eventually, everyone went off to bed.

The memory lingers. “I can still picture him at the Shiretown Inn having dinner or coming downstairs in the morning, wrapped in a chenille bedspread.” She feels it is “so good to re-tell the story, as it happened back in the ’70s, and we didn’t talk about it for a long time.” She smiles, “It really happened.” 

Excerpted from Music on Martha’s Vineyard, by Tom Dresser and Jerold Muskin. (History Press, 2014)