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Residents remember a legend in Jackson
Published 6/27/2009 in Local News
By RACHAEL GRAY
News of Pop icon Michael Jackson's death spread rapidly all over the world. His music quickly gained the No.1 spot of iTunes sales and YouTube plays. Facebook wall posts and shared items all had Jackson themes. According to the Los Angeles Times, Jackson-related traffic doubled Twitter's update frequency and tripled Facebook's.
Garden City's Hastings, 2108 E. Kansas Ave., also felt the Jackson surge.
Friday afternoon, music manager Cathy McGowen said Hastings was all but cleaned out of Jackson items. She said the store had posters, DVDs and many of Jackson's albums. At 5 p.m. Friday, the store was down to two compact discs of his album "Number Ones."
Hastings has ordered more items and will have a memorabilia display soon, McGowen said.
McGowen, who is 53 and a Jackson fan, said most of her memories of Michael Jackson began when he was part of the Jackson Five. She said she remembers watching the Jackson Five appearances on the Ed Sullivan show in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
She said he will always hold the title as the "King of Pop."
"Others may try and succeed in other ways, but there will never be another performer like him," she said.
McGowen talked about his contribution to music videos and said that Jackson made channels like MTV famous.
He knew how to create art and push the envelope, she said.
Julian Ortiz, 24, said he was online and watched the events unfold after Jackson was rushed to the hospital Thursday.
"I was never much of an Elvis fan, but now I know how his fans felt when he died," Ortiz said.
Ortiz remembers the first time he saw Jackson's music video for "Black and White." He said he was sitting in his living room with his parents and was watching the Fox Network.
"The video came on and I was just amazed," Ortiz said.
The "Black and White" video stars Macauley Culkin as a young boy who blasts his father into outer space with loud guitar volumes. The father lands in Africa among lions and Jackson dancing with a tribe.
Ortiz said he'd never seen anything like it.
USA Today reports that stores around the country are all seeing spikes in Jackson sales. The most popular item on Amazon.com is the 25th anniversary editon of "Thriller," the world's biggest selling album of all times.
Ortiz has the original on vinyl.
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