Confused, excited fans wanted to hold his hand

SALEM, Mass. -- Most everyone Herb Van Dam's age has a favorite Beatle. His is John Lennon. The Salem man was the first guy in his Cape Cod high school to grow out his hair, and he always identified with Lennon's rebellious side.

But Van Dam's eyes, big and brown and sunken, made him a dead ringer for Paul McCartney.

After the Fab Four appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show," girls would approach the skinny 17-year-old in his tight, off-white Levis to report he looked just like dreamy McCartney.

"Girls," he says, "who never talked to me before."

These days, everyone's talking about The Beatles due to the much-hyped release on Sept. 9 -- or 9/9/09 -- of "The Beatles: Rock Band" video game and the band's remastered catalog.

But there's a different date on Van Dam's radar, Saturday, Sept. 12, the 45th anniversary of The Beatles playing at the Boston Garden, to be forever known as the scariest day of his life.

Van Dam had come to Boston to help his friend Dan Jarvis move into his college apartment. They heard a local radio station urging people to stay away from the craziness on Causeway Street caused by the British Invasion.

Jarvis suggested they go and take a cab to avoid the traffic.

The second Van Dam stepped onto the street, he was surrounded by hordes of female fans screaming, "It's him. It's him." They grabbed his hair, his ears, his lighted cigarette. They tried to pull off his watch and class ring for souvenirs. They ripped off his sweatshirt and left scratch marks on his back.

"It was like a shark feeding frenzy," he says.

Van Dam was curled up in a ball when a police officer ordered the girls to "break it up." He crawled out on his hands and knees and ran down the street. Three blocks away, he climbed under a car in a parking lot to hide. He safely watched the racing feet go by and back again.

After a storekeeper gave him another shirt and he found his friend, they managed to score two tickets from a scalper. All night, he kept pushing his hair back to disguise his mop-top. He insisted to girls who approached that he was not the guy they thought.

"Still, I probably signed 100 autographs," he says.

Accounts of his mistaken identity and the "minor riot" that ensued were picked up by Boston newspapers. Van Dam saved the clips.

As the Beatles' popularity soared, so did the false sightings.

In 1967, Van Dam was in Scottsdale, Ariz., visiting his friend's parents when a large group of teenage girls gathered on the lawn. The family's last name was McGuinn, and somehow the rumor spread that Jim McGuinn of the Byrds and McCartney were staying inside.

Girls peered through windows and knocked on the door. They called the house, "This is Capitol Records. Let me speak to Paul."

The story again made the local newspaper with the headline: "McCartney Look-Alike Finds Life Dangerous."

Van Dam had some fun with it over the years. His friends would hustle him into the back of a restaurant and say, "No autographs." They rented a limousine when the Beatles played Suffolk Downs, and Van Dam rolled down the window to wave at shocked passers-by.

In 1990, he saw McCartney at Foxboro Stadium, and a young guy stopped to ask if he was who he thought he was.

"You still have it," his wife, Connie, quipped.

Then last month, Van Dam got tickets to see McCartney at Fenway Park. Van Dam is now 62 years old and let his silver hair grow long this summer, in honor of the Woodstock anniversary. McCartney's hair is still dark, and his wrinkle-free face may have had a little help from some friends.

Many of those screaming girls are now grandmothers, and not a single person at the concert made the same mistake again.

Susan Flynn writes for The Salem (Mass.) News.