Publisher’s Perspective

By Tim Douglass, Publisher of the Pope County Tribune

(From the song American Pie)

But February made me shiver

With every paper I’d deliver

Bad news on the doorstep

I couldn’t take one more step

I can’t remember if I cried

When I read about his widowed bride

But something touched me deep inside

The day the music died

So bye-bye, Miss American Pie

Drove my Chevy to the levee

But the levee was dry

Them good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye

Singing, “This’ll be the day that I die”

This will be the day that I die…

I was just an infant when the world learned that Buddy Holly, Richie Vallens and J.P. Richardson (known as the Big Bopper), were killed in a plane crash on a cold Feburary night after playing the “Winter Dance Party” at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa.

My wife, Kim, and I visited the Surf Ballroom last weekend for a concert.  The Surf remains a functioning ballroom to this day, although it also part museum.  It was improved and restored in the 1990s, but the original ballroom still remains with its original wooden dance floor lined on two sides by booths that could hold two or four patrons.  There was a large bar room area as well as another bar and a huge standing room with a large pop corn maker.  The smell of freshly made pop corn wafts through the the entire building.

Anyway, that was the site where the three rock ‘n rollers last played music on this earth.  

Anyone my age or older knows the story.  And Don McClean memorialized the plane crash as the “day the music died” in his 1970s hit called American Pie.

While the “Surf” as locals call it, was the attraction, we took a few hours and drove about five miles out of Clear Lake to the site where the plane came to rest in a snowy cornfield.  There’s a small monument near a gravel road with “Buddy Holly Glasses” that marks a walking trail to the middle of a field.  There, about a quarter mile walk from the gravel road, is a single still steel pole erected at the crash site.  Fans have made their own memorial there with lots of eye glasses, coins, toy guitars, full beers and other memoriabilia.  It’s really not much for three iconic figures, but they died so young–all three under 24 years old.  And their careers were just getting started.  Valens was 21, Holly was 22 and the Big Bopper was 24.  The walk to the site was on priviate land, but permissible, and a small walking path is flanked by a corn field on one side and a bean field on the other.  We walked it alone.  There were groups of two or three heading back to their cars and we passed a lone man as we walked back.  It certainly wasn’t a tourist trap of any kind.  

When we were at the Surf, we also read the front page of the Mason City Globe-Gazette, the Feb. 3, 1959 issue of the newspaper that carried the front-page news of the plane crash.  It featured a large black and white photo of the site where the crumpled plane came to rest with arrows pointing out the where the bodies of two of the victims were near the plane wreckage.  

According to the report, the single engine, four-place Beechraft Bonbaza left Mason City Municipal Airport for Fargo at about 1 a.m.  It crashed just seven miles northwest of the airport.  The wreckage wasn’t discovered until about 9:30 a.m. the next morning.   Holly, Valens and Richardson were in the plane while other members of the rock and roll troupe  chartered a bus for Fargo after their performance at the Surf.  The others were Dion and the Belmonts, Frankie Sardo and the Crickets, of which Holly was the star.  

A sign on the marquee outside the Surf said it all:  “The music lives on.  Welcome Rock ‘n Roll fans!”