In April 1959, a pair of black, horn-rimmed eyeglasses was found in an Iowa cornfield. Plucked from the dirt during preparation for planting and given to law enforcement, the mangled specs were sealed in a manilla evidence envelope and tucked into a courthouse basement—forgotten for decades. The iconic frames belonged to Buddy Holly, the greatest creative force in the history of early rock music.
Two months prior, on Feb. 3, 1959, Holly, 22, prodigy Richie Valens, 17, and J.P. “Big Bopper” Richardson, 28, died on impact when their airplane plunged into the same cornfield. The daisy chain of events that preceded the crash comprise a heartbreaking narrative too implausible for fiction. Likewise, the cast of characters directly involved or tangentially affected—from Waylon Jennings to Bob Dylan to Don McClean—is a roll call of the surreal.
A decade after the crash, in the same field where Holly was killed, Iowa farmer Jeff Nicholas walked rows of grain every summer of his youth, but had no inkling the soil beneath his boots covered a jagged scar that seismically changed U.S. culture.
Over 60 years later, Nicholas has added a key chapter to the mammoth tale. The rural crash site, surrounded by the silence of farmland, is protected and shepherded by Nicholas. Along a turnrow, a simple memorial marks the spot open to the feet of thousands of annual visitors.
The story of Holly and his cohorts ended on farmland—and was reborn on farmland. Nicholas helped turn a tragedy into an American triumph. “The music died on the farm, but it didn’t die forever,” he says. “We’re done mourning and now we celebrate, honor, and preserve a legacy. Stories come and go, but this one strikes a chord that’s still reverberating.”
Where to begin? Roughly 1,000 miles southwest of Iowa corn in Texas cotton.
Behold, The Comet
Born in 1936 to the flats of northwest Texas in Lubbock, Holly spent his teen years soaking in a musical alchemy of country-western, gospel, and rhythm and blues, while honing his guitar skills and singing at car lots, skating rinks, or high school auditoriums.
The boy from Lubbock idolized the boy from Tupelo. In 1955, Elvis Presley performed in Lubbock, and the two nascent stars, only a year apart in age with similar social backgrounds, became fast friends. However, Holly was a far cry from a sleek, streamlined Presley clone. With 145 pounds stretched over a 6-foot frame topped with forehead curls and rockabilly glasses to compensate for 20/800 vision in both eyes, Holly’s physical appearance was akin to a soda jerk or drive-in carhop, rather than a breakout rock star.
In May 1957, Holly and his fledgling band, The Crickets, released “That’ll Be The Day,” rocketing Holly into the stratosphere of musical influence as a giant who wrote, created, and performed his own material. The No. 1’s and hit records flowed at a furious pace: Peggy Sue, Oh Boy, Not Fade Away, Rave On, It Doesn’t Matter Anymore, It’s So Easy, Maybe Baby, I’m Gonna Love You Too.
As the prototype for a rock ’n’ roll band, Buddy Holly and The Crickets blitzed the industry in 1957-58, performing with Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, The Everly Brothers, The Drifters, and a host of top-tier artists. Worldwide tours followed, including 25 concerts in England, where young teens John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, and Keith Richards took in shows, stunned by the stratocasting Holly. (The Beatles and The Rolling Stones formed several years afterwards, significantly molded by The Crickets,)
Holly was a comet. The bespectacled boy-next-door with a soft Texas drawl forever changed the calculus of music—all within an outrageous 18-month timespan—a dramatically smaller window than any comparative musician of the era.
On Jan. 26, 1958, at 21, holding the world by the tail, Holly made his second appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show (just over a year after Presley’s benchmark first appearance). Roughly a year later, at the height of fame and promise, Holly and two other rock’n’roll princes fell from the sky.
The Secret
Jeff Nicholas, 65, grows corn and soybeans in northcentral Iowa’s Cerro Gordo County, just outside Clear Lake. His grandfather (William H. Nicholas) began farming in the 1920s and purchased large acres as a major pioneer in the turkey industry, establishing seven hatcheries and a processing plant: A Nicholas Turkey stayed in-house almost from egg to Thanksgiving plate.
In the early 1960s, Nicholas’s father (William L. Nicholas) added several farms to the family operation including the purchase of a slightly rolling, average-yield field roughly five minutes northwest of Clear Lake. At the time, bushels were irrelevant. “My dad bought the place without much concern about yield,” Nicholas explains. “We’d take 40 to 80 acres and break it into 10-acre pens to raise turkeys. They provided manure for the soil, and when we moved the turkeys, the ground was naturally fertilized, and then we transitioned it back to corn and soybeans.”
As a farm boy during the late 1960s in Cerro Gordo County, Nicholas often hooked a flatbed trailer to a Farmall 350 tractor and drove slowly across the field, focusing on six to eight rows with each pass as he hunted for equipment-damaging rocks—mostly between a potato and volleyball in size.
Hauling load after load of rocks out of the field, Nicholas had no clue the dirt harbored a secret: It was the precise spot where the music died in 1959. “We had no idea Buddy Holly’s plane came down right here,” Nicholas says. “My dad bought the farm a couple years after the fatal crash, but the details slipped by. Even into the 1970s, I was in that field picking up rocks, but I never knew.”
“Everything that led to the crash that night, and everything afterwards is too overpowering for words,” Nicholas describes. “Even now, you can stand in that field and feel what happened.”
Gold For The Price Of Bread
In late 1958, Holly split from The Crickets and moved toward potential music production in the bright lights of New York City, alongside his bride, Maria Elena. However, money woes drove him back on tour, where he recruited the “New Crickets,” including fellow Texans, Waylon Jennings (bass) and Carl Bunch (drums), along with Oklahoman Tommy Allsup (lead guitar).
The four Southwest natives signed as the headliner for the Winter Dance Party, a package including Richie Valens, charging hard on “La Bamba,” an epic hit for the ages; J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson of “Chantilly Lace” fame; Dion and the Belmonts; and Frankie Sardo. The tour opened Jan. 23, 1959, in Milwaukee, Wisc., slated for the dead of a particularly bone-chilling Midwest winter—24 stops in 24 days with thousands of road miles in between.
In a logistical nightmare, the tour crisscrossed the ice and snow of Iowa and Minnesota aboard unheated, reconditioned school busses—essentially vehicles ready for the scrapheap, sometimes crawling at 25 miles per hour. The first 10 days of travel required a succession of five bus replacements as night temperatures dropped to -30 and spurred a stream of breakdowns.
The subzero temps exacted a heavy physical toll on the band members. Along the Michigan-Wisconsin border, drummer Carl Bunch was hospitalized after suffering frostbite in his feet (while wearing six pairs of socks) and forced off the tour.
Despite the brutal weather, Holly’s name, along with the notoriety of his heavyweight counterparts, filled seats to capacity at each stop. Bob Dylan, three years away from his first album release in 1962, caught the Jan. 31, Saturday night performance on the front row of the National Guard Armory in Duluth. Forty-eight hours later, Holly was dead.
In 2016, Dylan paid homage to the memory: “If I was to go back to the dawning of it all, I guess I’d have to start with Buddy Holly. Buddy died when I was about 18 and he was 22. From the moment I first heard him, I felt akin. I felt related, like he was an older brother. I even thought I resembled him…”
“He was the archetype,” Dylan continued. “Everything I wasn’t and wanted to be.”
On Feb. 2, at 9 a.m., The Winter Dance Party departed Green Bay, Wisc., for a 350-mile jump to Clear Lake, Iowa, the eleventh stopover in the chain. The date initially was supposed to be a day of rest, but the money was irresistible. Once again, 25 miles outside of Clear Lake, a bus broke down.
Following the mechanical delay, Holly and his bandmates staggered into Clear Lake at 6 p.m. and prepared for an 8 p.m. to midnight concert split into two sets. Over 1,500 fans were packed and stacked for the show of their lifetimes. At a mere $1.25 per head admission fee, they bought gold for the price of bread.
The venue site was magnificent: The legendary Surf Ballroom, a rock ’n’ roll Shangri-la. Holly prepared to take the Surf’s elevated stage and crank his sound across a 6,000 square-foot, recessed dance floor lined in hardwood, flanked by faux palm trees, surrounded by booths and pillars, all under a barrel ceiling painted to blue sky. He would play for the Surf’s largest-ever crowd—a remarkable attendance number considering the date was a Monday evening marked by foul weather. There would never be an encore.
Sympathy’s Seat
Bone-tired, Holly reckoned with the unfolding math: The Surf show would end at midnight and the boys would clamber back in the wheeled metal tube with no heater for a 12-hour drive to the next gig—500 road miles northwest in Moorhead, Minn.
No dice. Holly bucked.
He asked Carroll Anderson, manager of the Surf, to charter an airplane to the next stop. Anderson dialed Dwyer’s Flying Service in nearby Mason City, requesting a flight to Fargo, N.D., a sister city to Moorhead, just across the Red River. Pilot Roger Peterson, 21, was tagged to make the trip. Starstruck, but with 700 hours on the clock and wary of nighttime flight in nasty weather, Peterson called veteran pilot Duane Mayfield and offered the cockpit controls. Mayfield declined to fly the rock stars, allegedly stating: “No thanks. I’m more of a Lawrence Welk fan myself.”
Inside the Surf Ballroom, Holly, Valens, and Richardson tore down the house. Outside, at the Mason City Airport, Peterson prepped a v-tailed 1947 Beechcraft Bonanza 4-seater for the flight to Fargo. At $108 total, each ticket cost $36. The three passenger seats were reserved for Holly, Waylon Jennings, and Tommy Allsup.
As the first set wrapped at 10:30 p.m., Holly telephoned his wife, Maria Elena, who was six months pregnant with the couple’s first child. Off-stage, hours from another slogging bus ride, Richardson and Valens approached Jennings and Allsup several times, anxious for a seat on the plane. For several days, Richardson had battled flu. Jennings, seeing Richardson’s struggles, surrendered his airplane seat out of sympathy. Richardson would be dead within three hours; Jennings would climb to the pinnacle of country music fame.
The second set ended close to midnight. Lacking roadies on the lean-running tour, the bands closed shop, exited the rear of the Surf Ballroom, and loaded their gear onto the Moorhead-bound bus.
In a telltale farewell with Holly that haunted Jennings to his final days, the pair of Texans said their goodbyes.
“I hope your damn bus freezes up again,” Holly said, grinning.
“Well, I hope your old plane crashes,” answered Jennings.
Turn of Silver
Climbing into an airport-bound station wagon parked at the back of the Surf, Allsup opened the vehicle’s rear door, surprised to see Richardson in the backseat, along with Holly in the front passenger seat and Surf manager Carroll Anderson behind the wheel.
Holly pivoted and delivered a life-changing request, asking Allsup to go back into the Surf and make certain no equipment was forgotten. Allsup re-entered the building and encountered Valens standing at an inner doorway, signing a final autograph for a lingering fan. Valens spotted Allsup and asked once more for the airplane seat. “Come on, guy, let me fly,” Valens said, according to Allsup.
Leaving the decision to the turn of silver, Allsup pulled a fifty-cent piece from his pocket. He flipped the coin and told Valens to make the heads-or-tails call. Ben Franklin vs. the Liberty Bell. Valens took heads.
Ben Franklin appeared. Valens died and Allsup lived.
The Widowed Bride
A few minutes before 1 a.m., Holly, 22; Valens, 17; Richardson, 28; and pilot Peterson, 21, climbed through the Beechcraft Bonanza’s single, right-side door and taxied toward the Mason City Municipal Airport runway, anticipating a 45-minute flight followed by a meal, laundry, and hotel sleep.
With the temperature at 18 F and dropping in 35 mph winds, the Beechcraft took off south into light snow, climbed to 800’, and turned northwest to Fargo. Jerry Dwyer, owner of Dwyer’s Flying Service, watched the small airplane fade into the night sky, noting a peculiar detail. In the distance, Dwyer observed a descending—rather than ascending—taillight glow in the darkness.
Dwyer’s taillight observation was no optical illusion or horizon anomaly. Whether by Peterson’s inexperience, a misread gyroscope, poor conditions, or mechanical failure, the Beechcraft crashed 5.2 miles after takeoff into 4” of snow atop farmland dirt—directly into the field owned today by Jeff Nicholas.
At 170 mph, roughly 3,000 lb. of metal smashed into the ground. The right wing struck first, just before the plane flipped and tore apart, skidding 500’ and ejecting Holly, Valens, and Richardson, while holding Peterson in the cockpit.
The crash site was grim; the death scene was gruesome. The Beechcraft was shredded—a mangled pile of metal. Parts were scattered 600’, with the fuselage wrapped around a barbed wire fence at field’s edge. In tandem, Holly and Valens rested 17’ away, and Richardson was found 40’ from the plane.
Roughly 10 hours after the accident, during an aerial search the next morning, Dwyer spotted the wreckage.
Details of the crash hit the wires before the families were notified. Maria Elena, six months pregnant, received the news of her husband’s death via a television broadcast bulletin. Overcome by the trauma, she miscarried two days later.
Almost 1,200 miles east of Clear Lake, in Rochelle, N.Y., a 13-year-old paperboy cut through cardboard wrapped around of stacks of newspapers in preparation for his daily route. He was stunned as banner headlines announcing Holly’s death spilled from the bundles. The young paperboy, Don McLean, owned three records. Two were by Holly.
Twelve years later, in 1971, McLean wrote and released “American Pie,” one of the greatest musical compositions of the 20th century, with Buddy Holly’s death as the focus of the opening stanzas: A long, long time ago, I can still remember how that music used to make me smile. Holly’s loss was punctuated by McLean’s haunting “American Pie” refrain, repeated six times in the lyrics: The day the music died.
Forever 1959
Blood and dirt are baked into “American Pie.” Less than a decade after the song’s release, Darryl “The Mad Hatter” Hensley, KZEV-FM DJ and radio personality of Clear Lake, kicked off a Buddy Holly tribute in 1979, and Ken Paquette, a longtime Holly fan from Green Bay, Wisc., later gumshoed the precise location of the crash in Nicholas’ field.
“I grew up knowing Buddy Holly music and later listening to ‘American Pie,’ but I was too young to realize the song was partly about our farmland,” Nicholas says. “I was in college in the late 1970s when I found out Holly died in our field. As a community, people didn’t talk much about Buddy Holly in the 1960s and 1970s because they didn’t want to be known as the death town. People swept the whole thing under the carpet and moved on—but there was no way to hide something so powerful.”
In 1988, Paquette placed a simple memorial at the spot where the fuselage came to rest and Nicholas later erected a giant, steel pair of Holly-style frames just off the gravel road running parallel to his field, serving as a bearing for visitors from across the world. Nicholas keeps the turnrow clear, providing pilgrims a five-minute walk from the roadside frames to the memorial within the field. The memorial is composed of a cross, guitar, and three stainless albums—one for each musician. Additionally, a set of pilot wings commemorating Roger Peterson was added in 2009.
Declining suggestions from various interests to install lights, music, and pavement, Nicholas maintains the site as it was in 1959. No less, no more. “The memorial is simple because Buddy, Richie, and J.P. came from a simple time and were just starting out. Rock didn’t yet have the hard edges,” he explains. “They had no sophisticated gear and no entourage. I’ve left the property as it was in 1959—a corn and soybean field. When you stand out here and close your eyes, you can go right back to 1959.”
Sincerely. The site marks the first rock ’n’ roll tragedy and arguably the most poignant of music’s losses. Visitors decorate the memorial with a trove of personal mementos—glasses, guitar picks, rosary beads, loose change, pictures, flowers, and much more.
“Buddy’s story grips the soul of Americans and it always will,” Nicholas notes. “I see license plates out here from across the country, and people get emotional because they recall memories of where they were when they heard the news, or they recognize the enormity of the loss.”
Past is present in Nicholas’ commemorative field. However, the real time machine survives in Clear Lake: The music never died at the Surf Ballroom.
Surf Salvation
The Beach Boys, B.B. King, Robert Plant, ZZ Top, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Conway Twitty, and The Everly Brothers are a mere sampling of the names who have taken the stage at the Surf Ballroom. The Surf shares musical bona fides with few peers on the planet: It is the place where rock ’n’ roll pivoted in 1959 and shifted the timeline of cultural history.
The building is alive. Originally built in 1949 during the big band era, the Surf has been home to jazz, country, blues, rock, and all points in between. It retains the vintage look and feel of 1959—a place where history echoes off the walls and a visitor is forgiven for expecting Holly, Valens, or Richardson to round the corner at any moment.
“Architecturally, it looks cool to the eye, but the visuals are surpassed by an ambience that everyone feels when they walk inside,” Nicholas details. “I love taking people in the front entrance for the first time and watching them as they see the recessed dance floor topped by the barrel ceiling. Words can’t properly describe the emotion.”
However, the Surf was once on the razor’s edge of extinction. No coincidence, Nicholas was a key player in the Surf’s salvation.
“I grew up just down the street from the Surf Ballroom,” he says. “I literally traveled by it thousands of times as a child walking, or riding my bike, or driving with my family.”
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Surf fell on hard times, almost bulldozed for lake condos and a grocery store. “The Surf underwent the same erasure witnessed on many Midwestern main streets—facades covered with metal and wood, and painted to look modern,” Nicholas recounts. “By the 90s, there were walls covered with wood paneling up to 6’ high in places, carpet on some walls, and mirrors on others. It was time to go back to the original architecture.”
In spring 1994, the Surf was shuttered—chains draped on the front doors. As president of the Chamber of Commerce, Nicholas knew Clear Lake was on the cusp of losing a historical masterpiece. “A local family in construction, the Snyders, bought the Surf in 1994 and began research and restoration,” says Nicholas, who now serves as president of the Surf’s board of directors. “As a community, we knew we had to do something—not just financially, but culturally.”
In response, the Chamber revived the Winter Dance Party in 1995 and pumped life back into the Surf. “It was a total community effort involving so many people,” Nicholas continues. “In 2008, we applied for non-profit status and have been operating a non-profit since. In 2009, we had the 50th anniversary of the Winter Dance Party, and we’ll keep going to at least 100. The Surf is restored in detail back to the very night Buddy, Richie, and the Bopper played.”
All Roads Lead to Holly
When Holly’s body was found atop farmland in 1959, his signature eyeglasses were not recovered—presumed lost in the snow or thrown beyond the search perimeter.
In 1980, while rummaging through filing cabinets in the basement of the Cerro Gordo County courthouse, Sheriff Jerry Allen discovered a sealed, manilla envelope, marked “Charles Hardin Holley, rec’d April 7, 1959.”
Allen opened the envelope and found the last remnants from The Day the Music Died: four dice, a cigarette lighter, a wristwatch belonging to Richardson, and Holly’s thick, black-framed eyeglasses—marred, twisted, and lacking lenses, but otherwise intact.
On April 7, 1959, after snow cover melted two months following the crash, the glasses were found and turned into the sheriff’s office, where they were catalogued and forgotten for 21 years, possibly due to the curveball thrown by the clerical use of Holly’s proper name, “Charles Hardin Holley,” rather than “Buddy Holly.”
In 1981, the glasses were given to Maria Elena. In 1998, the frames were sold for $80,000 to the Buddy Holly Center in Lubbock, where they are permanently displayed.
Holly’s legacy, once presumed to fade, only grows brighter with time. In many ways, his legacy was reborn on Nicholas’ land. Long after Nicholas has passed, Holly’s farmland memorial and the Surf Ballroom will remain. “Buddy Holly’s music was the trigger for everyone else,” Nicholas says. “There are more genres of music coming in the future and they will all connect back to Buddy Holly. We don’t have to promote this music; we just have to present it.”
“People come from across the globe to pay respect to Buddy, Richie, and the Bopper,” Nicholas adds. “I’m just a farmer, but I feel honored and privileged to promote the Surf and shepherd this special spot in my field.”
For more articles from Chris Bennett (cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:
Power vs. Privacy: Landowner Sues Game Wardens, Challenges Property Intrusion
Corn and Cocaine: Roger Reaves and the Most Incredible Farm Story Never Told
American Gothic: Farm Couple Nailed In Massive $9M Crop Insurance Fraud
Priceless Pistol Found After Decades Lost in Farmhouse Attic
Cottonmouth Farmer: The Insane Tale of a Buck-Wild Scheme to Corner the Snake Venom Market
Tractorcade: How an Epic Convoy and Legendary Farmer Army Shook Washington, D.C.
