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cardsharp
Music To
My Ears
“It was 20 years ago today! Sgt Pepper taught the band to play” Perhaps it’s all The Beatles’ retrospectives that are in the media at present, or the multiple Paul McCartney interviews that have been everywhere, but that particular first line from the title track of The Beatles’ most famous album, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, has been an earworm for Cardsharp for the last few days. Why that iconic line stuck in Cardsharp’s brain was not just nostalgic boomer ‘Beatlemania’, but something a lot more significant. As he wrote this column, he realised it was almost exactly to the day the 20th anniversary of the 09/11 terrorist atrocities. Cardsharp was reminded of this all too clearly with the excellent recent television documentaries, in particular the BBC’s ‘9/11 Inside the President’s War Room’. It certainly brought back memories. Those particular tragic global events, exactly 20 years ago almost to the day, could have been totally different for Cardsharp. To explain, on the evening before it happened Cardsharp and PG editor, Jakki Brown were very nearly in the epicentre of the inferno that would rock the world to its foundations and still has ramifications to this very day. To elucidate, both had been invited to give a talk at the annual American Greeting Card Association convention. The US publishers were desperate to learn about the success of the UK’s world leading greeting card industry and so were honoured for the opportunity to travel, expenses paid to extoll the virtues of the UK greeting card trade to the ‘great and the good’ of the American greeting card industry. The venue for the GCA convention a vast high-class country hotel in stunning Lake George, in up-state
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PROGRESSIVE GREETINGS WORLDWIDE
Above: Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album came out in 1967, but the lyrics of the title track remind us of milestone happenings. Left: The 9/11 anniversary is a reminder of the devastation that was caused to the whole world. No one believed Manhattan would recover, but it did.
New York in the Adirondack mountains. In the US, the GCA AGMs are not the single day events that we have in the UK. Due to the vast geographical distances between the location of publishers, the US annual convention is part holiday, part networking, part social, part business, taking place over a number of days.
We arrived earlier than the rest of the delegates having flown to Buffalo, New York state via Washington. The plane that followed ours out of Washington, was one that was hijacked by the terrorists who attempted to fly it into the Pentagon, only to be thwarted by brave passengers who stormed the cabin but failed to stop the plane crashing into the ground killing all on board. We were unaware of this at this time. The first we heard of it was at breakfast the following morning, via the screams of all the residents watching the television news live, as the Twin Towers came crashing down.