Buddy Holly: Biography (61 page)

In the early 1990s, in Clovis, New Mexico, Vi Petty continued to enjoy a generous share of Buddy’s earnings and to look after Norman’s estate, which included substantial property holdings. “Norman had been a big man in Clovis,” says Bill Griggs. “That’s why he never left.” Billy Stull, who managed the studios for Vi, found her to be a “gracious widow who loved to talk about the old days [and] would spend hours and hours with anyone who came over … to talk about old times.” To Griggs she was the “eccentric cat woman who picked up strays,” he reveals in 1995. “She had thirty-seven to thirty-eight cats in the double garage by the Seventh Street studio. She’d converted the old echo chamber into a place for cats. It stank.”

In 1992 Vi became desperately ill and went into the hospital, unable to digest food due to an ulcer that was blocking her intestine. “They tried to shrink it chemically and couldn’t so they operated,” says Billy Stull in 1992. “They had to remove part of her stomach which was ulcerated and reconnect it to the intestine, which is a pretty standard procedure, and she went through that okay. Then there was a ruptured intestine and her whole body was infected with peritonitis. She was in a coma five and a half weeks.”

Vi Petty died on March 22, 1992. “The actual cause of death was liver failure,” adds Stull. “She was only sixty-three.” Vi was buried next to her husband and their assistant, Norman Jean Berry, “under one huge stone in the Clovis cemetery,” says Bill Griggs. “The estate had assets of over $1 million.”

*   *   *

At last, in 1993, Buddy received an appropriate memorial—the U.S. government announced that it would issue a first-class Buddy Holly postage stamp on June 16, 1993. Virtually all the articles in the
Lubbock Avalanche-Journal
focused of how much money the stamp was going to make for the city rather than on Buddy’s life and music. There were no editorials nor feature stories on Buddy’s Lubbock background, his career, his influence on rock ’n’ roll, his records, his concerts, the manner of his death, or how his legend grew. No one in Lubbock was interviewed for personal reminiscences, though his family, Bill Griggs, and many people who knew and worked with Buddy were still residing in the city.

Instead of staging a concert of Buddy’s music, the Panhandle South Plains Fair booked C&W stars Alan Jackson and Tanya Tucker for the Fair Park Coliseum. The post office struck a deal with a T-shirt company. Ironically, Buddy had never been obsessed with money, only music and recognition, but monetary considerations seemed to be uppermost in Lubbock’s plans for celebrating the stamp. Russell Autry, president of the Lubbock Chamber of Commerce, spoke of the “dollar value” that the Holly stamp would bring to Lubbock “in terms of publicity and exposure.” It was time, he said, for Lubbock “to begin capitalizing” on Buddy, because “he will benefit Lubbock for years to come as people come here to visit Buddy’s hometown.” Those foolish enough to make such a trek would get precious little for their efforts. Expecting at the very least to see Buddy’s birthplace, a
Washington Post
reporter complained that nothing greeted her at 1911 Sixth Street, where Buddy was born, but “a small vacant lot, strewn with trash.”

On June 16, 1993, the official release date of the Holly postage stamp, Maria Elena and members of Buddy’s family were introduced to a cheering crowd of a thousand. Two years previously, a
Parade
magazine writer had described Maria Elena as “60, divorced, and living near Dallas,” but in a three-column photograph atop page one of the June 17
Avalanche-Journal,
a smiling Maria Elena, fashionably coiffed, alluringly feminine and shapely, appeared to be ageless. Asked to recall the first moment she met Buddy at Peer-Southern, she said, “He came through the door and it was like thunder coming through there,” the
Avalanche-Journal
later reported. She confessed her astonishment that Lubbock had at last woken up to Buddy’s greatness and decided to honor him. Both Cleveland and Santa Monica had tried to convince her to come to their stamp ceremonies, but she’d kept waiting and hoping that Lubbock would decide to do something, however belatedly. “I hinted. I prayed. I kept hearing from Cleveland, and I just hoped I’d hear from Lubbock,” she said. “But I’d never seen Lubbock get this involved.”

Travis Holley was “astonished” by the city’s sudden interest, after thirty-six years of neglect. He told
Avalanche-Journal
entertainment editor William Kerns that Buddy would be “proud if he were with us today.” Larry Holley added that Buddy’s family had long since “given up on the city doing anything.” He pointed out that several European countries had been honoring Buddy on stamps for years. Larry used the occasion to put to rest any rumors of a rift between the Holley family and Buddy’s widow. The were “still kin folks,” Larry said, and although they didn’t always see “eye-to-eye,” he always stayed at Maria Elena’s house any time he went to Dallas, he assured Kerns.

Jerry Allison shared the family’s surprise that Lubbock was “treating us so well,” he said. “I guess we’ve come a ways from 1956.” The carnival atmosphere of the ceremony quickly vanished when Bill Griggs spoke, reminding everyone of the tragic origins of Buddy’s legend. “We all know what happened,” he said, quoting Don McLean’s famous lyric equating Buddy’s death with the end of early rock. “I prefer to call it the day the music cried,” Griggs added.

At 9:01
A.M.
, John Frisby, Lubbock postmaster, canceled the first stamp and handed it to Maria Elena. Clearly visible in the distance, Buddy’s statue appeared to be bearing down on them like an avenging angel. Civic Lubbock, Inc., had recently dropped its connection with the once-annual Buddy Holly Music Festival. Maria Elena looked at the stamp, which shows Buddy against a background of white acoustic tile, smiling and playing his guitar, and told the postmaster she’d “treasure” and “display it” in her house. She was eager to return to Lubbock the following year if the Chamber of Commerce would arrange another “terrific” event, she said.

The Chamber of Commerce agreed to hold an annual summer observance in memory of Buddy, but the city that was capable of booking top C&W stars into the Fair Park Auditorium announced no plans for a major rock ’n’ roll festival, which would have been a more fitting tribute. If the stars who regularly pay fulsome lip service to Buddy—the Beatles, the Stones, Dylan, Clapton, Elton John, and Ronstadt—got together and staged a concert, with proceeds going to a Holly museum,
that
would be worth going to Lubbock for. Only an organizer with the vision and energy of a Bob Geldof or a Michael Lang could bring it off—a veritable Woodstock of the West—and then only if Lubbock, the Buckle of the Bible Belt, really wanted it, which seems doubtful.

At the conclusion of the stamp ceremony, fans formed a line at a mobile-trailer postal station which had been set up next to Buddy’s statue. Altogether, 24,571 Holly stamps were purchased in Lubbock. Only fifteen thousand of the Presley stamp sold, marking the first time that Buddy had ever upstaged Elvis, even in his hometown.

Earlier in the 1990s, the Lubbock developer who’d won Buddy’s Fender Stratocaster at Sotheby’s had seemed on the verge of realizing a brilliant vision for Lubbock and for Buddy’s memory. He offered the Holley estate $1 million “to use Buddy’s name and put up hotels all over the world, just for the use of Buddy’s name on them,” Larry Holley revealed in a 1992 interview. The various beneficiaries could not get together on the offer, one of them expressing fear that the hotel might put Buddy’s name on the toilet paper. The developer revised his offer, proposing a mammoth Disneyland-type Buddy Holly project to be located in Lubbock. He bought a large parcel of land around Fiftieth Street, two or three blocks long and a block wide, for a museum, a hotel, a park, and souvenir shops, with a Buddy Holly Boulevard running through it. He was buying up Buddy’s memorabilia for the museum.

Again, something went wrong. The beneficiaries were too demanding, the developer complained, according to Larry Holley, one of them going so far as to demand a percentage of every soft drink sold on the property. “His plan fell through,” says Bill Griggs. “He then offered to sell the collection to the city of Lubbock for $175,000.” The City Council met to vote on the matter in July 1994. Griggs spoke in favor of acquiring the collection, and the council voted unanimously to do so. Michael Reeves of the Lubbock Chamber of Commerce confirmed in 1995 that the city now owned “a large collection of Buddy Holly memorabilia … including a guitar and a sweater.”

The immediate problem for the city was where to house the collection. Lubbock proposed to build a Buddy Holly arena or “multi-event center,” which, according to Michael Reeves, was to be located next to the Civic Center. The focal point of the complex would be the Holly display. The issue was put before Lubbock voters in October 1994. “The public defeated the referendum for a tax increase to build the arena,” said Reeves in 1995. According to Griggs, the proposal lost by only six hundred votes. “Now there is talk of a new Fine Arts Center and a Visitors Information Center,” Reeves added. “The Holly collection could go in either place. We’re still looking for an appropriate place to house the display.”

As a temporary measure, the collection was scheduled to go on display at the Texas Tech Museum in Lubbock on the fifty-ninth anniversary of Buddy’s birth on September 7, 1995.

It seemed that Lubbock was finally showing signs of returning Buddy’s love.

Epilogue: The Last Dance

By 1993, thirty-four years after Buddy Holly played Clear Lake, Iowa, the old Surf Ballroom seemed to be in its final days. As early as 1988 the Surf’s manager had warned in the ballroom’s
News Letter,
“As president of the National Ballroom Association, I am aware of several mid-west ballrooms that have gone down the tube, including the Prom and the Terp. Unfortunately, these ballrooms seldom reopen.” It was increasingly difficult for tiny Clear Lake to keep the huge venue open. The annual Buddy Holly dance, drawing a few thousand people yearly, was the Surf’s only big attraction. Other than that, the cavernous dance hall functioned as a kind of community center hosting a few polka dances as well as rock ’n’ roll memorial hops such as the “Eddie Cochran Birthday Bash” in 1992. “If you want to vote, get married, look at new cars, celebrate a baby shower or the deer season, you book the ballroom,” said Doris Pease, editor of
Music Dance News,
which is published by the Minnesota Ballroom Operators Association.

While there was still a chance to see the Surf, I decided to take in the Buddy Holly dance in February 1993. Bill Griggs greeted me inside the lobby at 460 North Shore Drive and introduced me to a blond young man named Chris Hughes. When I interviewed Maria Elena later she explained that Chris Hughes has a real-estate brokerage license and had worked for her part-time in early 1993. After talking briefly with Griggs and Hughes, I began to explore the Surf, walking past the phone where Buddy had called Maria Elena, past the cubbyhole office where the flight to Fargo was arranged, then down the wide, sloping ramp to the ballroom, and out onto the great maple dance floor, big enough for a circus, and finally up to the little bandstand, with the band room to one side, all the way it was in 1959. If rock ’n’ roll has a holy shrine, it’s the Surf Ballroom, where you can still almost hear the sighs and cries of “True Love Ways.” Here early rock had its last hurrah, galvanized the young, and paved the way for the politicized music of the sixties that redefined modern society. More than in Lubbock, Memphis, or Cleveland, this is where you can feel the heartbeat of rock ’n’ roll.

Year after year, Buddy’s fans make their annual pilgrimage to Clear Lake, drawn by the old dance hall’s magical vibrations. On the Friday morning after I arrived in 1993, I found a roomful of middle-aged Holly enthusiasts breakfasting at the Holiday Motor Lodge. They were bright, clever, and prosperous-looking, not at all like Elvis fans in their goofy hats, beehive hairdos, and polyester pants suits. Three pretty women invited me to sit at their table—Sharon Black, Cathy Gacek, and Yvonne Pearsall, all from little towns in Illinois. They tell me they’re looking forward to dancing and having fun at the sock hop the following evening. Suddenly, Buddy’s British fans, led by Trevor Lailey, publisher of
Down the Line
magazine, and Clive Harvey of the British Buddy Holly Society, swept into the room, sporting black Buddy Holly sweatshirts, joking and catching up with old friends.

Griggs introduced me to Hans Goeppinger, a six-foot-three farmer from Boone, Iowa, who was old enough to have been around when Buddy Holly played the Surf but could easily pass for forty. With his graying blond hair and flashing blue eyes, Hans looks like Leslie Howard, Oskar Werner, and Max von Sydow rolled into one. He was volunteering his services as a docent for the weekend, responsible for chauffeuring dignitaries and singers arriving for the festivities, including Maria Elena and the Crickets. He invited me to drive to the Minneapolis airport to pick up Sonny Curtis and Mike Berry, both flying in from Nashville. Though it’s an ten-hour round trip by car from Clear Lake to Minneapolis, I seized the opportunity; as Buddy’s most recent biographer, I was eager to meet Sonny Curtis, a bona fide Cricket and Holly pal dating all the way back to KDAV.

When I wondered aloud why Sonny wasn’t flying into Mason City, as I had, Bill Griggs said, “If you were a Cricket, would you fly here in a light aircraft, the only thing that comes into Mason City, after what happened to Buddy?” Jerry and Joe B. weren’t taking any chances, either; they were driving into Clear Lake aboard their tour bus.

Hans’s new Lincoln Town Car, smooth as a magic carpet, whisked us over snow and ice and through dense fog to Minneapolis that afternoon. Settling into the cozy warmth of the sedan, I looked out over the snow-covered fields along I-35, thinking of how Buddy and his friends had suffered as the GAC bus trundled over these same roads in 1959. “The ‘Winter Dance Party’ came along here, didn’t it?” I asked Hans.

He nodded and said, “They crisscrossed all over these parts. I’ll never forgive myself. I was a brash little kid and a big rock fan. I’d often go up to touring stars and offer to take them to their next gig. That night Buddy played the Surf, I thought of coming over and giving him a ride to Moorhead, but my fraternity was putting on
Stalag 17
and I was in it. I often think how different it would have been.”