Beach Boys – "Fun, Fun, Fun" (1964)

Well, she got her daddy's car

And she cruised through the hamburger stand now

Seems she forgot all about the library

In the last 2 or 3 lines, we learned about John Lothrop, a Cambridge graduate and Church of England clergyman who renounced holy orders in 1623 because he believed in the separation of church and state.

At that time, the only lawful church in England was the Church of England.  All other forms of worship were legally outlawed.

Rev. John Lothrop

In 1632, Lothrop and 42 others were discovered worshipping together in a private home.  They were accused by the Archbishop of Canterbury of being "desperately heretical" and were locked up in "The Clink," the notorious London prison.

Two years later, Lothrop was released on the condition that he leave England.  He and 30 loyal members of his congregation sailed for Massachusetts, and eventually settled in Barnstable, the second-oldest town on Cape Cod.

Click here to read a 1964 magazine article about Barnstable by Kurt Vonnegut.

Lothrop built a home in Barnstable in 1645, which was eventually willed to the town for use as a library by William Sturgis, a wealthy clipper ship owner who was one of Lothrop's descendants.  Many of the library's original 1300 volumes came from Sturgis's private library.

The Sturgis Library is the oldest library building in the United States.  Here's what it looks like today:

The Bible that Lothrop brought with him on the voyage from England to Massachusetts was almost destroyed, according to an account written by a family member:

During the voyage to this country Mr. Lothrop dropped on one of its pages a spark of fire while reading at his evening devotions.  Unaware of the accident he fell asleep with the book partially closed, his fingers between the leaves.  At length, awakened by the heat, he found a hole had burned through several pages of the sacred Book, the only copy on the ship.  Before the voyage was completed the space thus burned was carefully filled, and the missing words on most of the pages supplied from memory with pen and ink in the old English text in which they had been printed.

After his death in 1653, his Bible was passed down from generation to generation of the Lothrop family before being donated to the Sturgis Library in 1957, where it is on permanent display:

Lothrop and many of his congegrants are buried in the Lothrop Hill cemetery in Barnstable:

The Beach Boys' 1964 single, "Fun, Fun, Fun," was written by Brian Wilson and Mike Love.  It peaked at #5 on the Billboard "Hot 100."

The song's lyrics don't specify the model year of the Thunderbird in which the heroine of "Fun, Fun, Fun" cruised the hamburger stand.  I'm guessing it was done of the second-generation Thunderbirds built between 1958 and 1960:

1960 Ford Thunderbird

Here's an early version of "Fun, Fun, Fun":

Here's "Fun, Fun, Fun":

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: