The Little Book (12 page)

“Young Burden has quite a head on his shoulders,” the headmaster would observe in faculty meetings. He would then tell in a good-natured manner how, on more than one occasion, Wheeler had called the headmaster’s house and discussed with Mrs. Wiggins at some length the deeper meaning of his address in morning chapel or an item he had read on the
Boston Globe
editorial page, a practice the headmaster’s wife and consequently the headmaster chose to view as charming. “He seems to enjoy a good dialogue” was the understatement Mr. Wiggins chose to describe the boy’s eccentricity.

In physics class, Wheeler recouped from a year of failing work by writing a final paper of some distinction. The editors of the school’s literary magazine chose to view the piece as “poetic” and published it in their final issue. Mr. Warner, the physics teacher, known by even the young boys as Zoof, submitted it to a high school writing contest sponsored by the
Scientific American
. The paper was an eloquent description of why the curveball seemed to break. “In the world according to Burden,” Zoof said without warning one day in class, “he was able to strike out six Dover batters because the speed of the ball for the first two-thirds of its flight overpowers the effect of the spin on the ball. It’s quite simple. When the ball slows down in the last third of flight, the spin dominates and makes the ball arc suddenly.” Anyone who could understand that concept and explain it so eloquently and simply deserved to pass the course for the year, something that had seemed impossible in Wheeler’s inauspicious beginnings as a physicist. It helped that Zoof had been a St. Greg’s classmate of Dilly Burden, and as a huge Boston Red Sox fan had himself always wondered why a breaking curveball broke. When asked by the editor of the
Gregorian
how he came up with such an elegant explanation, Wheeler said simply, “Bucky Hannigan.”

Things went well even with Prentice Olcott, or at least the older boy stayed away from Wheeler, knowing when he had been licked.

As unlikely as it had seemed at the outset of the Burden Project, Frank Standish Burden III, like his famous father and grandfather before him, was suddenly and triumphantly a St. Gregory’s boy. He was invited back for his first class year. Wheeler, like his father and grandfather, would graduate from St. Greg’s. That first class year would go by relatively uneventfully, with Wheeler becoming more conventional and Mr. Esterhazy continuing to fill in the empty portions of his slate.

If the pitching performance against Dover served to turn the St. Gregory’s faculty, it also set in motion Wheeler Burden’s acceptance to Harvard College. Mr. Wiggins, it was said, now gave his endorsement. Harvard, like St. Gregory’s, was more than willing to accept the son of its legend Dilly Burden, Harvard Class of 1936—provided he was not going to be an embarrassment to the admissions process. By fortunate coincidence, the director of admissions was a St. Gregory’s man and had been in attendance at the fateful Dover game. By winter of his second St. Gregory’s year, his first class year, there was a groundswell to send the boy on to Harvard. Wheeler went along with the idea largely to please his grandmother, for whom he cared a great deal and of whom he had grown more admiring and more fond.

It was not until after Christmas of that first class year at St. Greg’s that Wheeler went to New York to find Buddy Holly. Most of his weekends had been tied up with detentions and work details, and he had no idea how to find the man. He had written a handful of letters to Holly and had received nothing in return so decided to go to New York and see what he could do about meeting his idol.

He told the school he was going in to Boston to stay with his grandmother, and he hitched a ride with a Boston University student who lived on the Lower East Side. He got a room at the YMCA, and the next morning went to the office of Coral Records, where he asked everyone he saw who looked even remotely like a musician where Holly was living. Finally a man with a Cockney accent told him an address in Greenwich Village. Wheeler went to the apartment and got no answer at the door. It was a terrible Saturday night, raining and cold. He kept going away and coming back. Around one in the morning, miserable and shivering, he was standing in the doorway when a cab pulled up and a man covered by a dark brown slicker got out and began struggling with two large equipment cases. Wheeler stepped out to help. “Thanks much,” the man said and led him into the alcove of the apartment and opened the door with his key. “Perhaps you can help up the stairs,” he said, as he turned to Wheeler. “You look wetter’n a muskrat. Better come up and have something warm.” Wheeler was halfway up the stairway to the garret apartment before he realized that the man was Buddy Holly.

Holly was born Charles Hardin Holley, in Lubbock, Texas, in 1936, five years before Wheeler Burden was born in London. He grew up in a musical family and learned the violin and piano before developing a love for country music and beginning to play the guitar in elementary school. During his high school years, when he was in a rock band, he tried to take the songs he wrote to other musicians. In 1955 Elvis Presley came to Lubbock, and that sealed Holly’s fate. He and his band traveled to Nashville in an attempt to make records. But it was not until 1957, when he was out of school and playing music full-time, that he tied up with a music promoter named Norman Petty in Clovis, New Mexico. He recorded with his band, the Crickets, his song called “That’ll Be the Day” and the phenomenon that changed Wheeler’s life was launched. A year later, restless to write and sing on his own, Holly split from his Texas colleagues and moved to New York City, where he was beginning to take his music in new directions. He was living in a Greenwich Village apartment with his new wife, Maria Elena, when totally by coincidence, he offered refuge from the wintry blast to a scrawny, misplaced prep-school kid from Boston, who probably reminded him very much of himself a few years earlier.

Wheeler sat in Buddy’s apartment for five hours, until dawn. They talked and played guitars, and Wheeler watched while Holly recorded a song on his tape machine, asking his guest to join in. Then he walked over to his record player. “Listen to this,” he said. “It’s Haydn.” The strains of a classical piece filled the room. “I’m working on something new,” he said with a smile when he lifted the needle from the record, and then he picked up his guitar. “Listen,” and he began a chord pattern and sang a first line. Wheeler listened, mesmerized, having no idea how important that moment would be in his life. “It’s my new direction,” Holly said.

“That’s beautiful,” came from Wheeler in little more than a whisper.

“Think it’s got promise?” the rock-and-roll icon asked, and Wheeler only nodded. Then the mentor ran the pupil through the chord progressions until the two of them were playing together, and Holly began the uh-uh-ohs of the undeveloped chorus. “Here,” he said. “You do the melody and I’ll sing a third above you.” And their two voices fell into that territory of flow so that Wheeler could not hear where his began and his great hero’s ended. Holly beamed. “Whoooeee!” he said. “That’s what I call
promise
.” And thus began the seed of what two decades later would be called the definitive song for an entire age.

When they stopped it was nearly morning. “Better get some sleep on that couch,” Buddy said.

At around ten, Wheeler awoke, embarrassed to discover how soundly he had slept, and found himself alone in the New York apartment. As he was leaving a note on the kitchen table, he discovered a package wrapped in plain white paper and rubber bands. It had “Kid” scrawled on it. “This is so you’ll remember. Keep playing.” He opened it and found the tape they had made, which he placed in his suitcase before he headed back to Boston. No one at St. Greg’s ever knew about his trip to New York City or his early-morning music session with a legend.

About a week later, the morning of February 4, 1959, Wheeler was sitting sleepy-eyed at school breakfast when a younger boarder approached him with a sick look. “Sorry” was all he said and dropped the front section of the
Boston Globe
onto Wheeler’s table. Wheeler stared down at the paper, at first in disbelief. The headline read: “Holly and two singers killed in Iowa Plane Crash.”

The only black clothing Wheeler had was a dinner jacket that had belonged to his father. He wore it with a black shirt and black string tie the whole day.

12

The First Shomsky

On weekends while at Harvard, Wheeler would come into Boston and spend time with his grandmother at the family house on the narrow cobbled street where she had spent house on the narrow cobbled street where she had spent her childhood and had raised Wheeler’s father. Eleanor Burden was in her eighties and in spite of her weak heart was sharp, alert, and witty. He had always loved visiting the house the few times when he and his mother traveled east. Now that he was on his own, and a man more or less, he and his grandmother had a growing friendship.

“You know, Standish,” she said to him the first week of classes, “the men at Harvard are very restrained. They will think you a bit outgoing.”
Outgoing
was the term she had used with him since his visits in his childhood. Wheeler figured it was her way of encouraging him to start cautiously. He had already survived the St. Gregory’s campaign, so he knew a thing or two about Boston formality.

“I know, Grandmother. I think I already have a reputation as a wild bull on the pampas.”

“They will ask you to join the Porcellian, your grandfather’s and father’s club. It’s a pretty stuffy bunch, in fact probably the stuffiest of the stuffy bunches. But I hope you will consider their offer.” As she finished, he saw her looking at him appraisingly. Wheeler knew she was crazy about him. “You will do them good,” she said with a wry smile.

One visit in particular stood out in Wheeler’s mind. One of his St. Gregory’s classmates who had also come over to Harvard met him in the Yard one day and told him of an antique travel book he had found in Widener Library with what appeared to be his grandfather’s name in it. Wheeler had gone to check it out and had found that, yes indeed, there was a travel guide, a Baedeker’s Guide for Austria, 1896, with “F. S. Burden, Jr.” inscribed on the front page. Wheeler thought it peculiar because he had not realized that his grandfather had been a junior. He took it to his grandmother and expressed his puzzlement. “Wasn’t Father the junior? ” he asked. His grandmother held the small red book for a long time without speaking.

“You are right. It was your father,” she said softly, bringing the book to her breast and holding it there for a long time, closing her eyes. When she opened them, Wheeler could see that they were filled with tears. “He loved old books,” she said. “He must have bought this one and inscribed it when he traveled to Europe in college with Brod Walker.”

That first year at Harvard, Wheeler took a philosophy course from Professor Broderick Walker, “your father’s dearest friend,” his grandmother said. She was touched and amused. “Standish, you in a philosophy course will be a source of wonder. I hope they are ready for you.” She had always loved the way he roamed through ideas. She would sit in her Beacon Hill living room and listen to him for hours, always encouraging him to digress and embellish.

As his grandmother predicted, the philosophy course was the highlight of the year, as was Joan Quigley. He learned far more than he expected from the philosophy course and from a Radcliffe girl. His grandmother had no way of predicting the Joan Quigley part.

As you have no doubt realized by now, my son, Wheeler, was something of an obsessive, and while at Harvard College he became obsessive about music. That is the only way to account for what was to follow. When he first got to Harvard he had asked around about guitar players. He bought a used Fender Stratocaster electric guitar to accompany his father’s old acoustic Martin and began daily practice, and was beginning to sound like his rockabilly mentor. He wanted to learn more licks and maybe join a band. A friend took him to Brattle Street, where he played a little and listened a lot. That was the other part of the coffeehouses that compelled him, the seemingly endless supply of musicians, most all of them guitar players. Cambridge and the area around Harvard Square radiated an infectious excitement in the early 1960s, and he found himself in the middle of it. Wheeler thought he was in Wonderland full of beatniks, long-hairs, radical thinkers, unconventional poets, and even a few naïfs like himself. It was a world that could not have been more different from the Sacramento Valley where he had come from. “One thing for sure,” Wheeler observed later, “they were all people who had never heard of Dilly Burden. And that was a great relief.”

He loved being around the coffeehouse scene; it drew him like a siren song. The Brattle Street cafés were filled with people reading papers, dressed in dark and simple clothes. But it wasn’t just the new licks on the guitar that sent him back to his room to practice, it was also the wild ideas. There was always someone willing to sit and digress, always willing to listen and take seriously his ideas, and nothing stopping where he took them. There were always more to add, more references to pile on, more books to peruse after a late-night session. It was even better than conversing with the governor of California or Chet Huntley. “You’re in heaven, pal,” his friend Bucky Hannigan would say if he could see him now. Wheeler had never been around people who were willing to accept his wild questioning of things and to hear his views about politics and society, about the world as it should be.

The coffeehouse musicians were interested mostly in folk music, but as time passed it became clearer and clearer to him that it was rock and roll that fascinated him.

The Buddy Holly tape gained him a certain notoriety. He had shown it to no one at St. Gregory’s, but when he played it for the coffeehouse group he soon became known as a kid who could play. A group of students from Boston University had formed a small band that specialized in imitations of top-forty rock bands. They called themselves The Shadow Self, and their leader was a guitarist named Hitzie, who could pick about as fast as anyone Wheeler had ever seen, lightning fast. He seemed to like Wheeler’s hanging around and picking up guitar licks, but when the group heard the tape of the kid from California singing that song with the Buddy Holly soundalike, all of them took a different kind of notice.