Buddy Holly got a star in Hollywood, and his widow accepted it
Gary Busey, who played Buddy Holly, in the film of his life, and widow Maria Elena Holly speak at Holly's posthumous award ceremony as a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2011.
Many sing about “the day the music died” on February 3, 1959, when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.B. “Big Bopper” Richardson were killed in a violent plane crash.
Don McLean coined the term in his 1971 hit song “American Pie.” The song, about the decline of the 1960s, begins with the deaths of the three young musicians, “the happy end of the 1950s,” he told Forbes.
Investigators suggest that rapidly changing weather conditions that were not communicated to the inexperienced pilot were the cause of the accident that left such a tragic mark on the history of music.
Wreckage of the plane crash that claimed the lives of rock stars Buddy Holly (Charles Hardin Holly), Ritchie Valens (Richard Steven Valenzuela), and The Big Bopper (Giles Perry Richardson, Jr.) on February 3, 1959, outside Clearlake, Iowa. (Michael Oakes Archive/Getty Images)
“It is believed that shortly after take-off, Pilot Peterson entered a completely dark area with no distinct horizon; snow conditions and the lack of a (visible) horizon required him to rely solely on his flying instruments,” the Civil Aeronautics Board, charged with investigating the accident, wrote. The plane and its guidance.
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The musicians had just wrapped up part of their “Winter Dance Party” tour at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, on the evening of February 2.
FILE: Original poster for the Winter Dance Party that was supposed to feature Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper. All three crashed that morning. (David Crane/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News/Getty Images)
The 24-day tour kicked off in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and criss-crossed Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa in the dead of winter.
“Organizationally, the tour was a complete disaster. The shows were often scheduled hundreds of miles away from each other while going through one of the deadliest winters the Midwest had seen in decades, on the worst available transportation available,” says the hall member. website. “Musicians crammed into a windy bus to perform in dance halls and small theaters, and by February 1, Carl Bunch (Holly's drummer) had left with freezing feet.”
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File: Buddy Holly and the Crickets perform The Ed Sullivan Show at the Ed Sullivan Theater on January 26, 1958 in New York City. (Steve Oroz/Michael Oakes Archives/Getty Images)
The 22-year-old Holly, the tour's driving force, grew tired of broken-down buses in the freezing temperatures and chartered a four-seat plane to get to the show the next night in Moorhead, Minn., according to the CAA. Board incident report. Fargo, North Dakota, was the nearest airport.
The musician asked guitarist Tommy Alsop and bassist Waylon Jennings to join. The tour included Valens, Richardson, Dion, Belmont, Frankie Sardou, Jennings, Alsop and Punch.
Valens, 17, had never been on a small plane before and asked Alsop to take his seat, according to the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture. The two flipped a coin, and Valens “won” the seat.
File: Ritchie Valens (Richard Steven Valenzuela) performs on a television show in 1958 Los Angeles. (Michael Oakes Archive/Getty Images)
Jennings gave up his seat to Richardson, who had the flu, according to the incident report. Jennings told the Country Music Hall of Famer that his last conversation with Holly will always haunt him, even though the words were in jest.
After Jennings tells Holly he won't be on the plane, Holly says, “I hope your damn bus freezes up again.”
“I hope your first plane crashes,” Jennings replied.
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FILE: A group of men view the wreckage of a Beechcraft Bonanza plane in a snowy field outside Clear Lake, Iowa, early February 1959. (Hulton Archive)
– Declining winter weather conditions
Holly, Valens and Richardson arrived at the airport just after 1:30 a.m. The air temperature was 15 degrees and the wind was gusting about 36 mph at the Mason City, Iowa, airport. A cold front fell from western Minnesota across Nebraska, with a secondary cold front across North Dakota, the report said. Widespread snow preceded the fronts, accompanied by gusty winds.
“The temperature and moisture content were such that there was ice and moderate to heavy precipitation in the clouds along the route,” the report stated.
Air traffic controllers provided weather reports to 21-year-old pilot Roger Peterson several times from 5:30 p.m. until takeoff. The pilot had been flying for about five years as a commercial contract pilot and flight instructor for the company that owned the plane, headed by Hubert Dwyer.
“He was a young married man who built his life around flying,” the accident report said.
Two observers provided weather reports to Peterson, which included conditions in Mason City and Fargo, along with one waypoint. Unfortunately, the Nuclear Weapons Authority issued “flash warnings” overnight, indicating that conditions were deteriorating.
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File: Buddy Holly statue in Buddy Holly Plaza in Lubbock, Texas. (Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)
“None of the callers recalled bringing these prompt warnings to the attention of Pilot Peterson. Mr. Dwyer said that when he accompanied Pilot Peterson to ATCS (Air Traffic Control Service), no information was provided to them indicating that instrument flight weather would be encountered along the way The Road.”
Peters was certified only for visual flight rules, or clear weather, and not for instrument flight rules, for flying in clouds. He passed the written instrument flight test but failed the practical flight test nine months before the accident. He logged 52 hours of instrument training, all of which was taken using a traditional artificial horizon instrument, the gyroscopic horizon.
The gyroscopic horizon, now called the attitude indicator, shows the pilot whether he is flying parallel to the ground, up or down. The indicator on the ill-fated Beechcraft Bonanza was a different type of indicator, an attitude gyroscope. According to the accident report, “it is the exact opposite of what the traditional artificial horizon depicts.”
The report indicated that ATCS was responsible for providing the pilot with all available information and interpreting the data if requested.
“At Mason City, at the time of takeoff, the barometer was lowering, the ceiling and visibility were low, light snow was beginning to fall, and the surface winds and gusts were so high that one could reasonably expect to encounter bad weather during takeoff,” the report continued. The flight is estimated at two hours.
File: Official death certificate for Buddy Holly. (Bob Moderson/Getty Images)
The analysis section of the accident report painted a tragic picture.
“There is evidence that the weather feed consisted solely of the current weather reading at the en route station and the station's forecast for the destination,” the report stated. “Communications’ failure to call the pilot’s attention to these warnings and emphasize their importance could easily lead the pilot to underestimate the severity of the weather condition.”
An air traffic controller and Dwyer saw the plane take off around 1 a.m. Dwyer told investigators that the plane took off normally and climbed. After about 5 miles, the plane's illuminated tail gradually descended and then disappeared.
Air traffic attempted to contact the pilot via radio, but did not receive any response.
File: Personal items from the site of Buddy Holly's plane crash found by a local farmer more than two months after the accident. Buddy frames without lenses, dice, watch strap, clock and back plate that probably belonged to the Big Bopper, and a Zippo lighter. (Bob Moderson/Getty Images)
Collision
It wasn't until 9 a.m. when Dwyer was flying overhead looking for the plane that he found it under 4 inches of snow. Parts were scattered 540 feet into the far field and the main wreckage lay on a barbed wire fence. The pilot was found in the plane, but the three musicians were eliminated.
Investigators found evidence that the plane was rigged to cruise and fly at an appropriately high speed, 165-170 miles per hour. But the plane was descending at 3,000 feet per minute and perpendicular to the ground when it hit.
The coroner's report stated that the plane skidded and/or rolled for 570 feet before it was stopped by a fence.
“The shape of the mass of debris was like a ball with one wing protruding diagonally from one side,” the coroner’s report stated.
File: Official coroner's inquest report (page 1) into the plane crash of 3 February 1959 that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper. (Bob Moderson/Getty Images)
The analysis noted that gusty winds and turbulence would have caused the rate of climb and turn to be variable “to such an extent that interpreting these instruments as far as attitude control is concerned would be difficult for an inexperienced pilot like Peterson.”
“It is possible that he became disoriented and thought he was making a climbing turn when in fact he was making a downward turn,” the report concluded.
The coroner said that parts of each body were frozen over 10 hours of exposure at a temperature of about 18 degrees. The flight director had to initially identify each body by clothing.
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File: Buddy Holly's gravestone at the Lubbock City Cemetery in Lubbock, Texas. Holly was the ancestral spelling of the star's name. (Ronald Martinez)
Maria Elena Holley told the Australian Financial Review, 60 years after the crash, that she learned of the incident on television. The shock caused her to miscarry her 6-month-old fetus with her husband. She missed the funeral.
The review said she was supposed to attend the tour but canceled when she found out she was pregnant. She said she was afraid of small planes and that he would never have gotten on the plane if she had been with him.
