“When they were leaving town, Bill, their manager, was taking them to the Salt Lake airport and they were talking about me. “I got in trouble, so I didn’t get the that day.” Instead of going to the library, we hitched up and went to a local drive-in that had some really great food and kids,” she laughed. Word got around that the night before I had supposedly gone to the library with my friends. “One day I went down to the station and I was driving my little Ford Falcon, not the T-bird. Though even the sweetest of us were once guilty of some juvenile shenanigans, back in her day, the convertible-cruisin’ college kid had a little rebellious streak. I was kind of selfishly using his car all the time,” she admitted. From there, I’d meet him down at the station after my morning at school for work. So I would trade him my little Ford Falcon for his T-bird and go to my classes. Basically, I could take his car and park in front of every classroom and every building I wanted to go to. Because of the fact that he had the T-bird, he had a faculty sticker – it was a driving campus at the time. He drove a T-bird, and he would get a new one every single year. “So, I was going to school at the University of Utah where my father was also on faculty. “Bill would bring The Beach Boys to town five or six times a year to perform at a local amusement park called Lagoon, or the Terrace Ballroom – either one,” Shirley continued. His business manager, Bill Hesterman, was friends with Murry Wilson, the father of Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, and Dennis Wilson – three of the Beach Boys,” she explained. At the time, it was the number one rock station in the Valley. “It was 1964 and my dad owned a radio station here in Salt Lake, KNAK radio. So, how did a Salt Lake City girl become the focus of one of America’s most renowned rock bands in music history? “Yeah, that was a few years ago,” she laughed. When sitting down with Shirley, she chuckled when discussing the worldwide hit, giving a nod to her claim to fame. SALT LAKE CITY ( KTVX) – Though you may not know her by name, Shirley England, a Utah native, is acknowledged nationwide as the girl who had fun, fun fun, ‘til her daddy took her T-Bird away. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated. This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated.
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