Buddy Holly: Biography (48 page)

The bodies remained out in the snow for ten hours after the crash. As I discovered researching this book, some people in the area were aware of the accident shortly after it happened—including at least one police officer—but, no doubt, they could not search the countryside for wreckage in the dark. As the coroner would later write in his report, it snowed through the night, and drifts formed around the bodies. “Some parts of each body had been frozen by the ten hours’ exposure in temperature reported to have been near 18 degrees during that time,” Dr. Smiley added. Scattered all about them were Buddy’s pistol, eyeglasses, and diamond-studded Omega, the Bopper’s dice, and Ritchie’s crucifix. Ritchie had landed on his face, close to Buddy. His brains and most of his skull were gone. His features were flattened beyond recognition. His right eye socket was empty. Both arms were shattered.

The Bopper, like a tenacious cowpoke on a bucking bronc from hell, had stayed with the plane until it hit the fence, which threw him into the adjoining field. He came down on his head, his skull splitting clockwise from his eyes to his crown. His brain was almost completely eviscerated. The right side of his face was misshapen and mangled beyond recognition. The bones in his arms, legs, and chest were practically pulped.

Trapped and enmeshed in the instruments he’d never learned to read, Roger Peterson was sticking upside down in the wreckage, one foot jutting crazily into the night sky. His body was wrapped around the instrument panel and bound to it by a spiky thicket of wires, cables, broken glass, and twisted metal. Roger Peterson looked as if he were disappearing into the jaws of a giant predator. His skin had been flayed from much of his body. His brain stem had been destroyed. His aorta was severed. His heart, lungs, liver, spleen, and right adrenal gland were ruptured and lacerated, and there were “multiple traumatic fractures” in his skull, sternum, sixteen ribs, pelvis, arms, right elbow, wrists, knees, and legs, and his right thumb had been amputated.

All four men died of gross trauma to the brain, the coroner later decreed. Had any of them survived, they would have perished in the subfreezing weather, though their bodies lay just 5.4 miles north of Clear Lake. At last, shortly before dawn, the Mason City Municipal Airport issued an alert. The reason given for the delay in finding the bodies was “early morning fog,” the
Globe-Gazette
reported in its issue of February 3.

The crash raises serious questions about private aviation and the governmental agencies that regulate it. The real tragedy of February 3, 1959, was that it didn’t have to happen. The Civil Aeronautics Board eventually laid much of the blame on an incomplete weather briefing and the pilot’s unfamiliarity with the plane’s instruments.

Jim Weddell, who attended the Surf dance, first heard about the crash between three and four
A.M.
on February 3, approximately six hours
before
the authorities recovered the bodies, he revealed in a 1993 interview. Weddell and his two friends were driving home after the show when they decided to pull into an all-night truck stop in Belmond, Iowa, thirty miles out of Clear Lake. Someone from the Mason City area came in and said, “There’s a plane down.” Adds Weddell in 1993, “No one knew who the victims were until the next morning.”

“What you’re saying alters the historic record,” I point out. “John Goldrosen, Bill Griggs, all the Holly experts are under the impression that no one knew about the crash until Dwyer discovered the bodies the next morning, around nine-thirty.”

“I know,” says Weddell, “but we heard about it at three or four o’clock in the morning at that truck stop.”

While inspecting the files of the Mason City Airport Commission, I came across reporter Douglas Hines’s 1989 article in the
Globe-Gazette,
which seems to corroborate Weddell’s testimony. Billie Rose, the fan who’d driven to the airport, went to the Half Moon Inn, a supper club, after waving good-bye to the stars. While she and her friends were eating, a policeman came in and told everyone that Buddy, Ritchie, and the Bopper had been killed in the plane crash. “It really blew our minds,” Rose told Hines. “We thought it was a pretty sick joke.” Contacted in 1995, Cindy Florer, who works at the Half Moon Inn, which is still in business, two blocks from the Surf (on the renamed Buddy Holly Avenue), said the restaurant usually remains open until about two o’clock in the morning.

Throughout the night, Dwyer attempted to reach control towers in Iowa, Minnesota, and the Dakotas, according to Goldrosen and Beecher, but no one had heard from N3794N. February 3 dawned a hazy, chilly day with a low overcast. Dwyer at last went looking for his plane, flying a two-seat Champ, sometimes as low as twenty-five feet from the ground, Bob Booe later told Terry. At 9:35
A.M.
, eight and a half hours after the crash, Dwyer spotted the wreck, he later told CAB investigators. But in the official report of Cerro Gordo County Coroner Ralph E. Smiley, the time was placed at “about 9:00
A.M.
,” and, later, Chief Deputy Sheriff Mayfield told the
Globe-Gazette
reporter Jeff Tecklenburg that it was around 8:40
A.M.
when dispatcher Esther Cook rang him with news of the crash. These discrepancies lend credence to the possibility that the people in the area knew about the crash before Dwyer spotted it. Elwin L. Musser, the
Globe-Gazette
photographer who photographed the crash site later that day, reveals in a 1995 interview that he heard the news “just after I got to work at 8:15.”

As Dwyer flew over the wreck that morning, Buddy’s yellow leather jacket was the one bright spot in the carnage. The coroner later noted that the force of the impact was so horrendous that all four seams in the jacket were split from collar to hem. Dwyer radioed the location to authorities. Booe later told Terry, “Jerry said, ‘They’re in a pasture … I think they’re all dead.’” A ham radio operator overheard Dwyer and leaked the information to the local station, scoring one of the scoops of the decade. (The only event comparable in the world of music occurred over two decades later, when John Lennon was killed in New York City outside the Dakota, his apartment building, in 1980.) After the leak that morning in 1959, the news of the plane crash was broadcast around the world.

In New York, Lou Giordano telephoned Maria Elena. Later, in a 1993 interview, she was asked, “When did you lose the baby?”

“When I got the news,” she replied. “I was sick in bed that day. As soon as I heard, the following day I lost the baby.”

“Was it too early to know whether it was a boy or a girl?”

“It was too early. I was just starting out.”

Lou Giordano tried to break it to her gently, asking her if she had her radio on or was watching TV. As soon as Lou determined that Maria Elena had not yet heard, he hung up and left for her apartment. Puzzled and curious, Maria Elena went directly from the phone to the TV and turned it on. It was a brutal way to hear. (In the months following the tragedy, no longer would the names of accident victims be broadcast before notification of next of kin.) Fortunately for Maria Elena, she was not alone in her apartment. Aunt Provi entered the room during the newscast. The cause of Maria Elena’s miscarriage was attributed to psychological trauma, according to
Parade
magazine.

In Lubbock, Ella Holley screamed and collapsed in sobs, Ken Johnson, associate pastor of Tabernacle Baptist Church, later stated. A well-meaning but insensitive neighbor had called her on the phone. “Put the radio on,” she said, Griggs later reported. “There’s some news about your son.” According to Ken Johnson, the announcer mentioned “an airplane crash in Iowa,” but Mrs. Holley instinctively turned the radio off to keep from hearing the worst. Just then she looked around and saw a contingent from the Tabernacle Baptist Church arriving on her porch that included Ben D. Johnson and Ken Johnson. “Oh, no! It can’t be true,” she cried, Ken Johnson said in 1993. The ministers calmed her and then prayed with her.

Later both preachers stepped out on the back porch for a word with Buddy’s brothers, Larry and Travis. “Maybe it was just the Lord’s will to take him before he got so deep in rock ’n’ roll,” said Ken Johnson in 1993. “Otherwise his testimony would have been rock ’n’ roll rather than the Lord Jesus Christ.” Larry Holley’s statements in a 1992 interview indicate that he agreed with Johnson. “The Lord figured He could probably get more actual witnessing to a bigger group of people through me and some of the rest of us that were left,” Larry said. But Carl Bunch, also a deeply religious person, told Griggs, “God doesn’t go around killing people. He’s not a murderer. God gives but He doesn’t take away.”

Carl learned of Buddy’s death when his mother called him long-distance at the hospital in Michigan. Medicated with painkillers for his frostbitten feet, Carl was resting in bed when a nurse put him in a wheelchair and took him down the hallway to a pay phone. People were staring at him strangely, and he couldn’t decide if the weird feelings coming over him were due to their curiosity or the drugs.

“Honey, what are you going to do now?” his mother asked, Bunch later recounted in
Reminiscing.

“Mom, I’m going to be okay,” he said, misunderstanding her. “My feet are just fine.”

“No, honey. I mean, what are you going to do
now?
”

“Well, Mama, just as quickly as I can get thawed out, I’m gonna join Buddy out on the road.”

“No, darling. You just don’t understand.”

After she explained it to him, he returned to his room, grieving and frightened. Back in bed, he looked up and saw three schoolgirls in the doorway, crying. One said her name was Rose. They had stayed out of school that day because they’d heard the late Buddy Holly’s drummer was in the hospital. Carl thanked them and said they made him feel “special.” Though he’d often been onstage, playing with rock bands, he’d never felt like an exceptional human being before. In gratitude, he tried to cheer the girls up but then started crying himself. “It’s so strange,” he told Griggs in 1981. “It’s hard to believe that it really happened, that they all died out there that way.”

*   *   *

“A cult is a phenomenon built on collective will, a confirmation that something of significance has occurred and must be kept alive,” writes David Dalton in his landmark biography of James Dean,
The Mutant King.
A cult is also a form of denial, a refusal to let go of a beloved icon. The legend of Buddy Holly was born the day he died, when fans like fourteen-year-old Don McLean began to mourn him. Delivering newspapers on his route that morning in New Rochelle, New York, McLean cut open a bale of papers and read the horrifying dispatch. “That was a miserable day for me,” McLean recalled in
Reminiscing.
And in a
Life
interview, he said, “Buddy Holly was the first and last person I ever really idolized as a kid.” A dozen years later McLean’s “American Pie,” the biggest record of 1972, identified February 3, 1959, as the day early rock ’n’ roll passed into history.

Future C&W star Ronnie Milsap heard the news while a student at the Governor Morehead School for the Blind near Raleigh, North Carolina. He’d been a fan of Buddy’s since first hearing him on the radio. “He sounded so sincere,” Milsap recalled in his autobiography
Almost Like a Song.
“And he wasn’t that much older than I was! It was like being hit with a tow sack full of wet cement the day they told me that Holly and the others had died. It was like losing a member of the family.… His music, and that of other pioneer rock ’n’ rollers, had unleashed the anger of America’s parents.… Buddy must have undergone harassment similar to what I received from the Morehead music teachers. So I felt close to him.” Milsap and a friend decided to stage their own private wake for “our fallen heroes,” playing and singing all their hits in the Governor Morehead music building. They were discovered by their overly strict music teacher, who was so outraged to find them singing rock ’n’ roll that both boys were banned from all future music programs at the school. Later, Milsap went on to score thirty-five C&W chart toppers, including “A Legend in My Time,” “Happy, Happy Birthday Baby,” and “Lost in the Fifties Tonight (In the Still of the Night).”

In the Midwest, the reaction to Buddy’s death on the morning of February 3 provided another sign that Buddy was quickly ascending to the realm of myth and legend. “I mean, I’ll never forget the image of seeing Buddy Holly up on the bandstand,” Bob Dylan, who’d caught Buddy in Duluth on January 31, later told
Rolling Stone
’s Kurt Loder. “And he died—it must have been a week after that. It was unbelievable.” Dylan added, in
Newsweek,
“The music of the late Fifties and early Sixties when music was at that root level—that for me is meaningful music. The singers and musicians I grew up with transcend nostalgia. Buddy Holly and Johnny Ace are just as valid to me today as then.”

*   *   *

After Jim Weddell and his friends left the Belmond truck stop where they’d first learned of the crash, they drove the remaining fifteen miles home, to Clarion. “We didn’t have school that day because there was so much snow,” he recalls in 1993. “We heard the names of the victims about midmorning. I was just shocked, really. Being there, and somebody getting killed the same night.”

Bob Hale, the Surf MC, was spinning records on the morning shift at radio station KRIB in Mason City. Blood drained from his face as a telephone caller told him the news. “I just lifted the needle off the record and told everybody,” he later said to Ken Fuson of the
Des Moines Sunday Register.
Within an hour, stunned teenagers flocked to the station in their cars, driving back and forth in front of KRIB with their radios on, hoping to hear a retraction.

DeAnn Peterson was at work at radio station KGLO in Mason City when her husband’s obituary came over the wire machine, according to Carroll Anderson. “I was young and he was gone,” DeAnn later told the AP. Her life was “shattered,” she said; she’d “never get over” Roger’s death. DeAnn was twenty-one. Eventually she would move to Minneapolis, get a job in the personnel department of Northeast Orient Airlines, and remarry. She never forgot Roger, however, and stayed in touch with his parents. Pearl Peterson, Roger’s grief-stricken mother, blamed the crash on the rock stars, telling the AP that Buddy, Ritchie, and the Bopper should have taken the bus to Moorhead with the rest of the tour party.