Buddy Holly: Biography (45 page)

Buddy used a pay telephone inside the lobby, next to a cavernous coat-check room, to call Maria Elena, who later described their conversation to John Goldrosen. The promoters had fulfilled none of their pledges, Buddy said, and everyone was disgusted. He was going to Moorhead, Minnesota, ahead of everyone else to take care of laundry and cleaning. Why, she wanted to know, should
he
have to be the one to go?

“There’s nobody else to do it,” he replied.

As Ritchie telephoned his family in California, Buddy went into Anderson’s office to arrange the charter flight. “Will you find out what can be done?” Buddy asked, Anderson recalled in 1980. The Bopper joined them, Anderson later revealed to Wayne Jones. “It was the Big Bopper and Buddy that set this up,” said Anderson. They told him they wanted to reach the Fargo airport in plenty of time before the Moorhead show in order to have their clothes cleaned and enjoy “a good night’s rest, too. That was the main objective,” Anderson added. Fargo, North Dakota, was just across the Red River from Moorhead, Minnesota, where they were booked to play the Armory the following night. With a population of about seventeen thousand, Moorhead was too small to have its own airport and depended on the facilities at Fargo, which was only ten miles away. Clear Lake also had no airport.

“How far is the airport from here?” Buddy asked, Anderson recalled in 1980.

“It’s only a mile and a half,” Anderson replied.

It was Anderson’s impression that they needed a third passenger to cover expenses; Buddy and the Bopper may have “encouraged Valens to go with them. Valens didn’t want to go at first,” Anderson said in 1977. Evidently Ritchie had got cold feet once he realized that the flight was about to become a reality.

Anderson attempted to reach Jerry Dwyer, the owner of the charter company, to book the flight, but Dwyer had left his office to attend a meeting of the Mason City Chamber of Commerce. Someone at Dwyer’s Flying Service in Mason City told him the fare—$108 for a four-seat plane, $36 each for three passengers—and said they’d call back in a quarter of an hour, as soon as a pilot could be found.

The pilot who took the assignment was Roger Peterson, an employee of Dwyer’s Flying Service. The twenty-one-year-old Clear Lake pilot was exhausted, having worked nonstop for possibly the past seventeen hours, Civil Aeronautics Board investigator Van R. O’Brien later estimated. The last thing young Peterson wanted to do was fly to Fargo that night. He had the following day, February 3, off, and he’d been looking forward to getting home to his attractive bride of four months. Now those plans were shattered. The Fargo flight would not start until 12:30
A.M.
, following the conclusion of the show at the Surf. Then Peterson would have to fly to North Dakota and back—a seven-hour round trip—before getting any sleep.

Perhaps he should have said no, given how fatigued he was, but Peterson was a Buddy Holly fan, Bruce Wilcox and Bill Griggs discovered in 1981, and he probably couldn’t resist the idea of flying the singer to his next gig. Maria Elena stated in 1993, “The young man was so impressed that he was flying all these stars and he insisted on doing it.” But only minutes after Peterson accepted the job, he evidently had second thoughts and tried to get out of it. Prodded by his conscience, he called a qualified pilot, Duane Mayfield, who was also chief deputy sheriff of Cerro Gordo County. Mayfield subsequently told
Mason City Globe-Gazette
reporter Jeff Tecklenburg that Roger Peterson asked him if he “wanted to take these singers” to Fargo. After Peterson ticked off the illustrious passenger list, Mayfield, unimpressed, said no, thanks, he was “more of a Lawrence Welk fan” himself.

Later, Peterson’s mother vigorously defended her son’s decision, saying that it had been characteristically selfless of Roger to undertake a flight “in the middle of a winter night.” When anyone faced an emergency, she added, Roger “was always there to do what he could.” Everything about Roger Peterson was appealing except for the fact that he was not qualified to fly under that night’s conditions. A wholesome Iowa farm boy, he was the oldest of Arthur and Pearl Peterson’s four children, born on May 24, 1937, in Alta, Iowa, a hamlet 105 miles southwest of Clear Lake with a population of fifteen hundred. By the time he reached high school, he was quite handsome—blond, well-built, and athletic. His steady date at Fairview Consolidated School was a pretty, intelligent girl named DeAnn Lenz. His mother described him to Bruce Wilcox in 1980 as “very popular” with “many friends,” a “good Christian,” an athlete who was nearly six feet tall and excelled at basketball. “A thoughtful, considerate boy,” he’d always helped his parents on the farm while growing up.

Art Peterson, Roger’s father, was such an avid aviation buff that he’d constructed a hangar and a runway on their farm. From the age of sixteen, Roger piloted the family’s Piper Cub J-3. His younger brother Ron eventually became the chief jet pilot for Gate City Steel in Omaha, Nebraska. Following an Army hitch, Roger worked as a car mechanic. He married DeAnn on September 14, 1958, and appears to have been the husband of every woman’s dreams, a macho jock who was sensitive and even loved to cook. His mother said his cakes were “superb.” DeAnn took a job to help with expenses.

Roger had received his pilot’s license from the Ross Aviation School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and worked at the Graham Flying Service in Sioux City, Iowa. In late 1957 and early 1958, Peterson underwent eight hours of training from Lambert Fechter, a flight instrument instructor from Hartley, Iowa. According to Fechter, Peterson could hardly control the plane. He began to experience vertigo and let the aircraft “go into a spiral to the right.” When Peterson became more experienced, such “tendencies grew less and less,” Fechter added.

Vertigo is characterized by a tangled, disoriented state of mind; dizziness sets in, as well as a sensation that everything is whirling around, including one’s self. During flight instrument training, most pilots learn to cope with vertigo: above all, the pilot must abide by his instrument reading regardless of his own feelings. According to Fechter, even pilots with many hours of flight time occasionally experience vertigo, but they always maintain trust in the instruments, Fechter later stated in a CAB investigation. Unfortunately Roger Peterson had failed his instrument flight check on March 21, 1958, according to Federal Aviation Administration general safety inspector Melvin O. Wood, who conducted the test. During the flight, Peterson descended below his assigned altitude and went into a dive. He managed to recover and climb back to his assigned altitude, but Wood canceled the rest of the test because it was obvious, Wood later stated in a CAB investigation, that Peterson was incapable of establishing “a proper holding procedure.”

Moreover, Peterson’s Airman’s Certificate, dated November 4, 1958, specified that “holder does not meet night-flight requirements.” In permitting Roger Peterson to fly, all the government agencies that are supposed to protect the public had inadvertently set the stage for disaster.

Peterson applied for work as a charter pilot at Dwyer’s Flying Service in Mason City and was hired by Jerry Dwyer in July 1958. With Roger working at Dwyer’s and DeAnn employed in the accounting department of KGLO-TV in Mason City, the newlyweds were able to establish a comfortable home in Clear Lake at the Armsbury Cottages on North Shore Drive. They attended Redeemer Lutheran Church in nearby Ventura. Dwyer was so pleased with Roger that he made him a flying instructor. By February 2, 1959, when his path crossed Buddy Holly’s, Peterson had accumulated 711 flying hours—not an inconsiderable amount—including 128 in the Beechcraft Bonanza, the plane that would be used to fly Buddy to Fargo.

Jerry Dwyer didn’t learn of the flight until Peterson reached him by phone at the Chamber of Commerce. Dwyer left the meeting at once and met Peterson at the airport to help prepare the plane, a single-engine four-seater, for the three-and-a-half-hour flight. It was hardly ideal weather for flying—eighteen degrees with snow flurries—but Peterson was bent on seeing the rock ’n’ roll stars. The Fargo hop would be the last flight out of Mason City that night, leaving at about one
A.M.
on the third of February.

On the evening of February 2, Rod Lucier, the “Winter Dance Party” road manager, heard of “a gathering Midwest snow storm,” the
Lubbock Avalanche-Journal
later revealed, and became convinced that the troupe should not travel that night. He decided to call GAC and express his concern.

Under the Sword of Damocles, the faintest of hopes began to flicker.

Chapter Fourteen

Winterkill

It was after eight
P.M.
and the first of their two shows that night was going to begin late. In the Surf’s communal “Backstage Band Room,” a shantylike affair annexed to stage left, Buddy listened to the stirrings of the crowd of thirteen hundred and “said he was worried about girls … pulling his hair,” Carroll Anderson recalled in 1980.

“I don’t think you need to worry about that at all here because security is pretty heavy,” Anderson said. Also, 125 to 150 parents were in attendance at the first show, Anderson added, and no doubt their presence would keep the kids on their best behavior. Fred Milano stood next to Buddy as they changed their clothes before going on. He noticed that Buddy wasn’t wearing an undershirt, he told Wayne Jones years later. The drafty old ballroom still used gas turbine heaters and was quite chilly, so Milano asked Buddy why he wasn’t more warmly dressed. Buddy replied that he never wore undershirts because if he wore them for several days and suddenly took one off, he’d “catch a cold,” he explained, as if he always was defying the elements. His nakedness was a constant theme of his life—a desire to expose himself directly to danger, whether through the music that he introduced to Lubbock or the challenge that he took on when he told Norman Petty to go packing.

Fred then inquired about the charter flight that everyone in the tour party was talking about. Buddy repeated that he’d take everyone’s laundry and it would be ready for them on arrival, Milano recalled. The flight would be over in “three or four hours,” but the bus trip would require “at least ten hours,” Milano added.

In its planning stage, the manifest for the flight to Fargo underwent numerous changes, which began around showtime February 2 and ended after midnight, when the passenger list was finalized just prior to takeoff. According to Waylon Jennings, Buddy leased the plane strictly for himself and his band, but other eyewitnesses, such as Anderson and Milano, later claimed that the Bopper was on the list from the beginning. Early on the evening of February 2, the Bopper somehow lost his seat, possibly when Buddy realized that his own sidemen, Waylon and Tommy, were entitled to first dibs.

Though Tommy Allsup stated in 1979 that he was on the passenger list from the outset, Fred Milano told Wayne Jones in 1977 that Tommy could not afford to make the flight. Dion revealed in 1988 that he saw Buddy going from musician to musician, soliciting passengers, saying he needed more people to share the charter fee. Dion liked the idea of flying but declined, calculating that it would cost him the equivalent of a month’s rent.

That was when “Holly rounded up Ritchie,” Dion wrote in
The Wanderer.
But if Ritchie made it onto the manifest before midnight, he didn’t stay on it for long. The final seat on the plane went to Tommy. At showtime the manifest read: Buddy Holly, Waylon Jennings, Tommy All-sup, and Roger Peterson, pilot. Maneuvering for seats on the plane was far from over, however. It would resume after the performance. During these vacillations, Rod Lucier was still hopeful of reaching someone at the agency and canceling the Moorhead gig.

At some point after eight
P.M.
, Bob Hale stepped on stage and noticed that the ballroom was “filled to the rafters.” The spaciousness of the hall belonged to another era—the age of the big bands and mammoth ballrooms like Roseland and Danceland and the Avalon—but now it was a rock venue and the kids were wearing not suits and formals and corsages but jeans and swirling felt skirts with cutout poodles on gold-chain leashes. The crowd’s anticipation ran high as they awaited them favorite recording stars. Half a dozen floorwalkers dressed in dinner clothes cruised the dance area, the tiers, and the promenade, surveilling the crowd for rowdies.

According to Carroll Anderson, Sardo and Dion and the Belmonts performed for thirty minutes for “dancing and listening” before the star attractions came on. Among the teenagers on the dance floor were Karen Lein and her future husband Jack, both seniors at Mason City High School. “I had my jeans rolled up, saddle shoes, and a big white shirt with a scarf around my neck,” Karen recalled in 1995. “We entered the jitterbug contest and danced up a storm.” Frankie Sardo opened the show with “Fake Out,” his ABC Paramount record that was gaining in sales as the tour progressed through the Midwest. Twenty-year-old Sardo had been acting, singing, and dancing with his parents in Italian theaters in the United States since he was five years old. He attended P.S. 108 in New York and Fork Union Academy in Virginia. With his matinee-idol appearance—fair skin, dark hair, and chiseled Michelangelesque features—he had his heart set on becoming a movie star but, as a
Hit Parader
article put it in 1959, “he can’t help it if it’s his singing voice that’s launching him into stardom.”

Kicking off the main part of the show, Ritchie Valens sailed into “La Bamba,” transfixing everyone with his ability to go from a soft, almost childlike attitude to a gritty impudence. Then, with Buddy backing him on drums and Waylon and Tommy playing their guitars, Ritchie sang “Donna,” giving it the same stately cadence and compelling gravity of Phil Spector’s “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” As
Rolling Stone
would later note, “It had the perfect creeping tempo for slow, passionate dancing.” According to Billie Rose, then a student at Clear Lake High School, “Everybody was out on the dance floor.” Though February 2 was a Monday—a school night—very little homework was done on the evening of the “Winter Dance Party.”