Buddy Holly: Biography (44 page)

Freezing is indeed one of the more gruesome ways to die. Human tissue deteriorates at temperatures below 32 degrees. By now the temperature in the bus was 40 below. Carl Bunch couldn’t use his feet. Victims of frostbite experience a pins-and-needles sensation as their tissues begin to die. In the next stage of frostbite, blood vessels freeze and complete numbness sets in. The skin turns white and is cold and hard to the touch; finally it becomes red and swollen. In advanced or “wet frostbite,” bacterial infection develops and gangrene sets in, giving off a foul odor as it spreads. The gangrenous area oozes pus. When it thaws, the dead tissue is black as tar and must be amputated, along with all adjacent tissue. Like the leper, the frostbite victim watches his body decompose and fall apart. Ideally, the sufferer should be treated promptly—sheltered from the cold and told to remain very still. The damaged parts should be immersed in lukewarm water at 110 degrees. In hospitals the patient is placed in a hyperbaric chamber at once, where he can breathe highly concentrated amounts of oxygen to help heal the damaged tissue.

Marooned in the unforgiving backcountry, Carl Bunch was at maximum risk. Exposure time necessary for frostbite varies. For someone who is dry and protected from the wind, it could be eight to twelve hours. For anyone in wet socks and exposed to the wind, it can strike in two to three hours. Carl had on all six pairs of socks he’d packed for the tour, but he had been exposed to subzero temperature for most of the two hours that had elapsed since the bus had left Duluth. To make matters worse, his right leg was especially vulnerable because of a severe football injury he’d sustained at the age of thirteen that later required surgery for bone cancer. Told by his doctors he’d never walk again, he was hospitalized for over a year and later confined to a wheelchair. Refusing to give up, Carl had learned how to play drums, hoping the footwork required by the bass and the cymbal would promote healing in his leg. The novel therapy succeeded; ironically, it also led to his present, life-threatening crisis.

Elsewhere on the bus, Buddy and Dion shared their blanket, telling each other the stories of their lives, talking “through the dark hours while we waited for something to happen,” Dion recalled in 1988. Ritchie, who was the type to cheer people up when they were down, jumped into the middle of the aisle and started a jam session. They all grabbed their guitars and joined in. Buddy’s proto hard-rock attack blended with Ritchie’s Latino rhythms and the Belmonts’ intricate harmonies, creating a music that had never been heard before. “And never heard again,” Dion added.

It took two hours for help to arrive. According to Tommy, the truck driver had gone on into Hurley, where he stopped and alerted the Iron County sheriff’s department to their predicament. A posse came out to get them in jeeps. They returned to Hurley in the predawn darkness of February 1 and were deposited at the Club Carnival Café on Silver Street, a former striptease joint. As if they hadn’t already suffered enough, the management of the café refused to serve the black bus driver. The musicians ordered his food and carried it to him at the Iron County Garage, where the bus had been towed.

Unable to walk, Carl Bunch was rushed to the Grand View Hospital, which is located halfway between Ironwood and Bessemer, Michigan, seven miles east of Hurley. Diagnosed with frostbite in both feet, Bunch was immediately hospitalized. For Carl, the “Winter Dance Party” was over, for the next few days at least. For the others, worse was yet to come. Their road manager, Rod Lucier, no doubt reported their circumstances to GAC, who offered little comfort. Though it was clear they’d never make it to Appleton, Wisconsin, in time for that day’s scheduled matinee, which had to be canceled, GAC expected them to perform that night in Green Bay, despite the ordeal they’d just been through.

At 11:30
A.M.
, February 1, the party pulled out of Hurley on a Chicago-Northwestern train, bound for Green Bay, an oasis of football madness. On their arrival in the city of the Packers, the first thing the Bopper did was dash into a store and purchase a sleeping bag. He’d picked up a terrible case of the flu. At the Riverside Ballroom that night, Ritchie substituted for Carl Bunch, playing drums during Buddy’s set. One of the Belmonts played drums when Ritchie sang his set, and Buddy was the drummer when Dion and the Belmonts went on. Whenever necessary, Buddy never hesitated to “jump out there and play drums to fill in,” Tommy later said. Sometimes Buddy alternated the job of drumming for Dion with Frankie Sardo.

The Riverside Ballroom’s two-hundred-thousand-square-foot dance floor was packed with two thousand teenagers boogying under a gigantic sunburst ceiling. Some of the girls wore ballet slippers and skintight “stem” skirts; others had on balloon layers of petticoats. Bouffant hair stylings (back-brushed and back-combed) were popular, though many girls looked pert in ponytails and Peter Pan collars. The boys wore their hair crew-cut or DA and preferred dirty white bucks, boots, or Florsheim loafers.

One fan, Sandy Stone Blaney of Ashwaubenon, Wisconsin, later told writer Mark Steuer how she edged her way to the front of the stage and reached up to Buddy, who “held my hand and sang a song to me,” she said. “And Dion held Sharon Larscheid’s hand and sang a song to her. We were in love with those guys.” Buddy was amazed that the kids knew the lyrics to his songs, including recent releases, well enough to sing along with him. After the show he rang his mother in Lubbock. He spared her the details of the bus breakdown but shared some news that may have been just as unwelcome. Chicano Ritchie Valens was coming to Lubbock to stay with them as their guest the following summer, Ella Holley later revealed in a 1964 letter to German fan Gerd Muesfeldt. Though Buddy was happy living in New York, obviously he was still thinking of Lubbock as home—and no doubt the point of inviting Ritchie to Texas was to produce Ritchie’s records at Taupe studios.

Though the tour party was supposed to have the following day off, GAC had a last-minute offer for a February 2 booking from Carroll Anderson, the thirty-nine-year-old manager of the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, 350 miles to the southwest of Green Bay. It was an unusual request; customarily the Surf used local bands or simply held record hops presided over by local DJ Bob Hale. Interviewed by Griggs in 1977, Hale explained that Anderson first called him shortly after the tour set out from Chicago in January 1959. According to Hale, Anderson knew who Buddy was but had to inquire about the Bopper and Ritchie. Hale assured him that “if he could get those three on one show,” they’d break the Surf’s attendance record. Anderson himself told Wayne Jones in 1977 that Buddy was “the star of that show” and the only real draw because Clear Lake “hadn’t heard of” the Bopper and Ritchie.

When Buddy discovered that GAC had greedily filled their one open date, he was distraught. As Anderson would later observe, Buddy by this point was “just a high-class bum being kicked around on the road.” In order to make it to Clear Lake, the tour party would have to depart immediately following the Green Bay show, with no time to take a shower or have their laundry and cleaning done in Green Bay. Buddy felt responsible for the morale of his band, which was at an all-time low after its ordeal in the North Woods. The tour was “really clicking good,” Tommy said in 1979, except for the torture of the freezing buses. Then, Norman Petty began to hound them, sending a telegram to Green Bay on February 2 warning them, according to Bill Griggs, to “stop using the name the Crickets because the Crickets are Jerry and Joe B.”

For the trip from Green Bay to Clear Lake, they were expected to use the same wretched GAC bus that had stranded them in the wilderness. Two hours after they’d left Hurley on the train the previous morning, a wrecker had arrived in Hurley, carrying a replacement engine for the bus. After it was installed, the driver delivered the bus to Green Bay. Altogether, they’d ridden in seven different buses since the tour started. Tommy later said that they considered flying but “something happened” and the idea was dropped, possibly because Waylon “was afraid of small planes,” Tommy added.

Expecting the worst, they boarded the bus in minus-25-degree weather with their road manager Rod Lucier. They left for Clear Lake, where they were scheduled to arrive at four
P.M.
for an eight o’clock show, but the bus kept breaking down all the way across Wisconsin and northeastern Iowa. Finally they ditched the bus, leaving it on the highway, according to Tommy, and finishing the trip in a rented school bus. At least they “did stay warm that time,” Tommy added.

In a 1993 interview Maria Elena said, “Buddy called from the tour and said how unhappy he was.” She asked him, “Why don’t you come home?” she recalled in a 1988 article in the
Chicago Tribune.
Buddy replied, “Maria, you know me. I have to finish.” And there was another motive: “We needed the money,” Maria Elena recalled. They had a baby on the way. A February 1 audit of one of Petty’s accounts showed that only $5,000 was due the Crickets, a far cry from the $50,000 to $80,000 they’d been expecting. Buddy was “infuriated,” Tommy later told Goldrosen. Petty’s audit may well have been as inaccurate as those of the Hollywood movie studios, long notorious for their so-called “creative bookkeeping.”

Ritchie was as fed up with the tour as Buddy and considered chucking it. Fearing his tour mates would call him chicken if he quit, he hesitated to “skip out,” Mendheim later revealed. He knew that some of the performers were still talking about chartering a plane; perhaps that would solve his problem. Though he was terrified of flying, he was so concerned that his fatigue from the bus rides would damage his performances that he decided to go along if they flew from Iowa to Minnesota, where they were due on February 3, 1959.

*   *   *

The thirty-six-hundred-acre lake that gives the north central Iowa village of Clear Lake its name was frozen solid for the winter of 1958–59. The white cottages surrounding it looked as if they’d been shuttered for months. Snow and ice blanketed everything, including the empty sidewalks. Tourist-board promotional leaflets boasted of winter sports such as ice fishing, snowmobiling, and cross-country skiing, but there was little evidence of human habitation.

By the time they bumped and skidded into Clear Lake, which then had a population considerably less than its present seventy-five hundred, Buddy knew he couldn’t endure another long bus ride. They arrived at the Surf Ballroom at 7:30 or 7:45
P.M.
and were due on stage at eight o’clock. A line of teenagers, many with their parents, extended from the box office all the way to the end of the sidewalk.

It was almost five hundred miles to their next gig in Moorhead, Minnesota. The thought of climbing back on the bus in a few hours was intolerable. Buddy made up his mind to charter a plane to Fargo, North Dakota, which had the nearest airport to Moorhead. They would leave immediately after the show. According to Tommy, Buddy told the other performers he’d take their dirty laundry and dry cleaning and have it ready for them by the time they arrived in Moorhead on the bus the following day.

The
Clear Lake Mirror-Reporter
later disclosed that Buddy told Bob Hale, the MC at the Surf, that he “didn’t want to take a chance in the bus since it had broken down while traveling from Green Bay, Wisconsin, to Clear Lake.”

Thirty-four years later, in February 1993, I found Clear Lake to be little changed, still nothing more than a wide place in the road. Winter light, which makes the air turn white, had made my landing at nearby Mason City extremely hazardous. Though our small plane came down in broad daylight, visibility was a frightening, blinding zero. The downtown area is only a minute’s drive from busy Interstate 35, which slices through the United States’ midsection from Texas to Canada. The only halfway edible food I found was at a big truck stop, where the “broasted chicken” had been fried in a pressure cooker, presumably to ensure maximum infusion of grease. The four-inch-high meringue on the “chocolate silk” pie looked promising, but the chocolate filling underneath had curdled into a black, rubbery clabber. In my Army days in the fifties, stationed at Fort Dix, New Jersey, I used to think that drab little towns like Brown’s Mills and Wrightstown were the last places on earth I wanted to be. I was wrong; it’s Clear Lake, Iowa, in the winter.

At some point during the evening of February 2, 1959, Buddy, Ritchie, and the Bopper ate dinner at Witke’s Restaurant, joined by Carroll Anderson and his wife Lucille, who worked with him at the ballroom, and Bob Hale. In 1980, now sixty years old, Anderson told interviewers Mike Oestreicher and Pat Kennedy that he always attempted, as a matter of policy, to make entertainers playing one-night stands in Clear Lake “feel as if that was their home” for the evening. Though tired, the stars struck Bob Hale as courteous, warm, “classy young men,” he told a
Chicago Tribune
reporter in 1988. Hale was then a DJ at radio station KRIB in Mason City.

The temperature outside Witke’s Restaurant that night was eighteen degrees. In warmer months, Buddy was assured, Clear Lake was a bustling resort. The Methodist Camp, the Girl Scout Camp, and the Open Bible Camp are all located on the lake’s south shore. Imagining how scenic Clear Lake would be in the springtime, Buddy’s mind turned to his favorite sport, waterskiing. Bob Hale later told
Des Moines Sunday Register
reporter Ken Fuson that “they talked about coming back to Clear Lake for a spring concert and going waterskiing.”

Anderson agreed to book the stars for a return engagement and said he’d finalize the deal later that week. Bob Hale hastened to invite them to dinner in his home when they returned in the spring, Hale later told Griggs. Leaving Witke’s they walked across the street to the Surf Ballroom, a relic of the big-band era that looks like an airplane hangar except for its box office and marquee. The glory of the Surf, which still stands today at the same location, 460 North Shore Drive, is the 6,300-square-foot rock-hard maple dance floor, which is darkly luminous, like a lake in the moonlight. Overhead an arched ceiling of midnight blue comes alive with drifting clouds, projected from a custom-made machine. Several tiers of art-deco wooden booths accommodate most of the ballroom’s twenty-two hundred patrons. Built in 1948 after the original Surf, which opened in 1933, was destroyed by fire, it was supposed to resemble a “Florida beach club.”