Buddy Holly: Biography (52 page)

Eugene Anderson indicated that these questions were not explored in the CAB report because the investigator in charge, the late C. E. Stillwagon, was solely interested in the condition of the plane and the pilot’s qualifications. Anderson concluded that the CAB report was “pretty sloppy.”

Local speculation that the crash victims had been taking drugs was based on nothing more than candy wrappers which were found around the plane wreck, Bill Griggs stated in his exhaustive 1989 article on the crash in
Rockin’ 50s
magazine. Though it is true that drug users crave sweets, it’s far more likely that the young men were eating the candy bars for badly needed energy and body warmth in the subfreezing weather. Despite suspicion of drug use, no drug tests were performed on the bodies. Because Roger Peterson’s autopsy had been carried out after arterial embalming, it could not determine drug use. Blood tests can only be done before arterial embalming.

Dwyer denied that the crash had been caused by pilot error and maintained, in a 1988 interview with Wayne Jones, that “my pilot was incapacitated in some manner.” In an interview with Kevin Terry, Dwyer stated, “There was more than what appeared on the report, especially around the head area.” On yet another occasion, Dwyer said, “I could tell the
National Enquirer
one hell of a story, but it would hurt a lot of people.” Eugene Anderson, one of the crash investigators, told Bill Griggs in 1989 that the crash was not Roger Peterson’s fault, calling into question the CAB’s verdict of pilot error and opening the possibility that there had been a struggle of some sort in the cockpit in the final minutes. Despite unanswered questions, the official CAB report was adopted on September 15, 1959. It was so incomplete that it failed to make any mention whatsoever of Buddy’s pistol, let alone explain why some of its bullets had been fired. The report came under fire from the FAA’s Eugene Anderson, who complained that “we didn’t see the report” until it had already been approved and released, and that Stillwagon had “overruled” certain pertinent lines of inquiry.

According to the wildest rumor, the pilot was shot by someone sitting in the backseat. Though Carroll Anderson saw Buddy in front and Ritchie and the Bopper in back just before takeoff, crash investigator Eugene Anderson stated that the Bopper was in front, that he and Buddy changed places during the flight. Anderson confirmed that sufficient space existed in the cockpit for “people to move around, even from back to front.” The CAB report offered unexpected corroboration of Anderson’s thesis; the CAB found that the heaviest person—the Bopper—was sitting in the front right seat. Incredible as it seems, the implication is that Buddy Holly shot the pilot.

Dwyer’s friend Bob Booe wondered if Jerry Dwyer “simply doesn’t want to admit that Roger was at fault,” Booe stated in Griggs’s 1989 article on the crash. Booe also dismissed charges of drug use as mere speculation. Interviewed in 1995, Jeremy Powers, a reporter who investigated rumors surrounding the crash for the
Globe-Gazette
in 1989, concluded that Roger Peterson was not shot and that drugs and alcohol played no part in the accident.

Attempting to resolve these mysteries, I visit the Mason City Municipal Airport in 1993, hoping to check the plane wreckage myself and see if there’s a bullet hole in the seat behind the pilot, as reported by one Lubbock visitor to Clear Lake in 1988. Though the CAB report stated the plane was sold for scrap, an employee at the airport tells me, “The plane is out here at the airport. It’s locked in a shed down here. Dwyer is going to make key chains out of the pieces. People keep asking him why he doesn’t put it in a museum. He just has it locked in a shed.”

No one answers when I knock on the door at Dwyer’s Flying Service, which is located in the new administration building that was constructed in the sixties. The airport director, Jerome J. Thiele, sees me trying to get in and invites me to his office upstairs, which overlooks the runway where N3794N took off 34 years ago. “Why did Buddy’s plane crash?” I ask Thiele, gazing over his shoulder at the long runway, lined on both sides by steep snowbanks. Some single-engine planes are sitting there, looking every bit as rickety as they did in 1959.

“It was snowing,” Thiele says. “The pilot didn’t have enough experience with his instruments. He thought he was straight and level in a climbing mode, but instead he was in a shallow dive.”

In 1959, lawsuits developed after the crash but were suddenly and mysteriously dropped. Ritchie’s mother sued Dwyer for $1.5 million, charging that the flight had been carried out in unsafe weather. The estates of all three singers reportedly were awarded $50,000 from Dwyer’s insurance company. That settlement, of course, could not compensate the families for the loss nor heal their wounds.

In practical aviation terms, little seems to have been learned from the disaster at Clear Lake, despite the celebrity of its victims. “The aviation industry was growing fast and the investigative force was strained to the extreme,” says veteran reporter Cy Egan, who covered air crashes in the fifties for the Standard News Association wire service. “They gave less attention to smaller aircraft, reserving time to investigate larger commercial airlines.” Thirty-six years later, there were still widespread charges that commuter planes are not safe to fly. Perhaps Waylon Jennings put it best when he observed, “His loss was all for nothing.”

On February 3, 1959, the fate of the surviving members of the tour—Waylon, Tommy Dion and the Belmonts, and Frankie Sardo—was equally hopeless and, for Waylon Jennings at least, deeply traumatic. With all of its headline stars dead, the tour logically should have been canceled following the plane crash, but GAC decided to continue the “Winter Dance Party” to its conclusion. Waylon and the others did not learn of the crash until their tour bus, muddy and battered from another punishing trip through the snow, rolled into Moorhead, Minnesota, around noon on February 3. The tour manager went into the hotel but quickly came back and boarded the bus, ashen-faced. “Come outside, I want to talk to you for a while,” he said to Waylon, according to an interview with Waylon published by Bill Griggs in 1981. Waylon sensed that something was wrong and refused to budge from his seat. Once again, the manager implored Waylon to get off the bus.

“No,” Waylon said, quietly but emphatically. The manager wandered off. Waylon turned to Allsup. “Tommy, you go,” he said. Allsup later stated on the TV program
Instant Recall
that he went up to the hotel desk and asked for Buddy Holly’s room. “Haven’t you heard?” the clerk said. “Those guys got killed in a plane crash.” Allsup returned to the bus, his eyes bulging and his face drawn. “‘Boys, they didn’t make it,’” Allsup said, Waylon later recalled in
Reminiscing.

Years later Waylon said he “felt guilty,” as if he were somehow responsible for the accident. At the time, all he wanted to do was “go home,” immediately. He would carry his grief for years, finally coming to a “tough reckoning with himself about that,” according to Reba McEntire in her 1994 autobiography
Reba.
After the 1991 plane crash that killed seven of McEntire’s musicians and her tour manager, “I was greatly comforted by [Waylon’s] words,” McEntire wrote. “‘Don’t you feel guilty because of the plane crash,’ he told me. ‘It wasn’t meant for you to be on that plane or you would have been. So don’t blame yourself and don’t feel guilty.’”

In Moorhead in 1959, Allsup found a telephone and put through a long-distance call to his mother. Luckily she hadn’t been watching the television, which for the past two and a half hours had been broadcasting news of Allsup’s death, due to the discovery of his wallet at the crash site. Waylon’s family was not as fortunate. His brother Tommy had been working on a tractor in a Littlefield garage when KVOW announced that the Crickets had been killed along with Buddy. “I went crazy,” Tommy said. Waylon’s mother was in shock. It was “two or three hours,” Tommy said, before a correction was broadcast.

Back in Moorhead, Dion stepped out of the bus and wandered around the hotel, still unaware of the news. In the lobby, empty except for two pale, stooped figures hunched before the TV, he paused and listened as an announcer described the crash. “There were no survivors,” the newscaster said. Dion returned to the bus, picked up Buddy’s Fender Stratocaster, and sat staring at the starburst design. “All around me were their belongings,” he recalled in
The Wanderer.

Fred Milano of the Belmonts was sound asleep on the bus, exhausted from the ten-hour trip. “The plane had crashed already,” Milano told Wayne Jones in 1977, “and the whole country knew about it except us. We heard it last.” Waylon was packing, hoping to accompany Buddy’s body back to Texas, when “the people from New York called and begged us to go on for a couple more days,” Waylon later told the
Chicago Tribune.
The promoters promised to fly Waylon and Tommy to Lubbock for Buddy’s funeral if they’d finish the tour. The agents also promised to pay them Buddy’s share for the remaining sixteen shows, amounting to $4,000. Waylon and Tommy agreed, but GAC later reneged on their promise.

In death Buddy Holly would be instrumental in the rise of many stars, including the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Hollies, Don McLean, Gary Busey, and Linda Ronstadt. But the first, created before the sun set on the day he died, was Bobby Vee, who lived in Fargo, North Dakota, and had been looking forward to attending the “Winter Dance Party” on February 3. A sixteen-year-old sophomore at Central High School, he was a Buddy Holly fan and had formed a band just the previous week. At the time he was still known as Robert Thomas Velline. Though small, Vee was classically cute: blond, smooth-skinned, bright-eyed, with a huge Mickey Rooney smile and perfect teeth.

At noon on February 3, he came home from school for lunch. His brother told him about the accident at Clear Lake. Turning on the radio, Vee heard an announcer ask for local talent to fill in for the dead stars that night. Back at school, where almost all the kids had tickets for the show, everyone was talking about the tragedy. A musician in Vee’s band, bass player Jim Stillman, called the radio station and offered to fill in, Vee related in a 1987 article by Bill Griggs. The announcer instructed them to appear at the Armory at seven
P.M.
for an audition.

When they were added to the bill, they realized they needed a name for the band. Just minutes before they went on at the Armory that night, Vee and his band christened themselves the Shadows, Vee later stated in the liner notes for his LP
I Remember Buddy Holly.
“It was a very bizarre evening. There was no merriment at all,” Vee told Holly fan Don Larson in 1979. Frankie Sardo murmured a few words in reference to the crash and sang Ritchie’s “Donna.” Many in the audience burst into sobs. Tommy Allsup seemed a million miles away, staring blankly over the heads of the dancers and the wire service correspondents who milled among them, soliciting quotes. For once, the performers were properly lit, thanks to a promoter named Bing Bingstrom, who filmed the show with an eight-millimeter camera and brought his own lights. Eyewitnesses that night gave wildly different accounts of the concert. To Fred Milano, standing on the stage, the crowd of two thousand teenagers “were trying to hold back the tears,” he later told Wayne Jones. But an AP stringer reported that they “screamed, clapped, and whistled as the rock ’n’ roll groups sang their best-selling numbers.” At one point during every set the performers “paid tribute to the victims,” the AP correspondent added.

As his turn approached, Bobby Vee looked on with increasing uneasiness as Dion, Sardo, Waylon, and Tommy wiped tears from their eyes, “and he saw the audience crying along with them,” reporter Pat Williams later wrote in
Movieland and TV Time.
Vee finally opened his mouth to sing, his voice “a bit unsteady.” Then he calmed down by thinking,
This is for Buddy.
It helped. He bounced through hits by the Everly Brothers, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis, captivating the crowd. It was his lucky night. He was discovered by Bing Bingstrom, who arranged other bookings. Vee subsequently debuted with “a fair-sized hit” record, “Suzie Baby,” and went on to work with Buddy’s friend Snuff Garrett, who recorded Vee’s “Devil or Angel,” a No. 6 smash. Many Top 40 singles followed, including “Rubber Ball” and “Take Good Care of My Baby,” as well as the albums
Bobby Vee Meets the Crickets
and
Nothin’ Like a Sunny Day.
“Our style was modeled after Buddy’s approach,” Vee said, referring to his vocal-and-instrumental group the Shadows. “I’ve never forgotten Buddy Holly and his influence on my singing style and my career.”

The crowd tensed as the Crickets, minus Buddy, began their set, Waylon, Tommy, and Carl bravely trying to sing “Rave On.” Though many were weeping, others focused on Waylon, whose charm and good looks were more evident now that he was in the spotlight. All started screaming and surging toward the stage. At first, Tommy assumed that the cheers were to honor Buddy’s memory. “But then,” Tommy later told Denisoff, “I realized they were for Waylon.”

Following the Armory show, according to Waylon, the promoters announced they were subtracting from their salaries the amount that Buddy, Ritchie, and the Bopper would have received. “This, after begging us to play. Real nice people,” Waylon later told Goldrosen. Though Moorhead was supposed to be a double-header, GAC canceled one of the performances in a display of decency. Although Carl Bunch had just recovered from frostbite, he reported for work the following day, Wednesday, February 4, in Sioux City, Iowa.

They were set to play the Shore Acres Ballroom in Sioux City with a new lineup of musicians, including Ronnie Smith, who arrived from Texas, Jimmy Clanton, and Frankie Avalon, who were expected to appear in time for the performance. Clanton, who’d scored five Top 40 hits in the past six months, including “Just a Dream,” “A Letter to an Angel,” “My Own True Love,” and “Go, Jimmy, Go,” had toured with Buddy in Iowa the previous July. When the “Dance Party” stars were killed, Clanton was taken off another tour and sent to Sioux City. “I always felt that they should have canceled that tour as only one act was left, and that was Dion and the Belmonts,” Clanton told Griggs in 1979. After joining the troupe in Sioux City, Clanton found Buddy’s guitar on a Greyhound bus parked behind Shore Acres. No one objected when he asked if he could use it that night.