Buddy Holly: Biography (47 page)

The rest of the tour party sat on the bus, peering out the frosted windows at the snow. Just as they started to leave for Moorhead, a carload of fans pulled up. They chatted with the musicians and mentioned that some of their friends were going to the airport to see the stars off. Someone on the bus told them that they’d never be admitted to the airport. But a fan named Billie Rose was already on her way there, accompanied by friends. The snow made driving on the highway dicey, according to another fan, Jim Weddell. Anderson noted that “it was spitting a trace of snow,” as he later told Wayne Jones. Back in Clear Lake, Bob Hale considered it far more than a trace. As he and his wife returned to their lakeside cottage, it was snowing “like mad,” he later told Bill Griggs. He felt sure that Buddy’s plane would never take off in such weather and took it for granted that the stars would spend the night in a hotel in Mason City and fly out the following day.

Jim Weddell confirmed in 1993 that the weather had turned nasty. “We were on our way home and it was a snowstorm, really blowing,” he said. “I can’t say that the snow was coming down that hard, but it was really blowing across the road. I remember the wind. That was the reason that we stayed at the Holiday Lounge in Clear Lake for a long time.”

Mason City, which the stars now approached in Anderson’s station wagon, bears the name of the Freemasons who wrested the area from Indians in the nineteenth century. Its population numbers thirty thousand. Buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the most influential architect of the century, can be found throughout the town, including the City National Bank and the Park Inn Hotel, both completed in 1909 and both classics of Wright’s Prairie School style, featuring his trademark terra-cotta brick trims, flat roofs, and jutting eaves. During the ride to the airport, the rock stars rehashed the Surf show. “‘We had as much fun as the kids did,’ they said,” according to a story in the
Lubbock Avalanche-Journal
later the same week.

At the airport, Anderson deposited them at Dwyer’s Flying Service. He later stated that it was 12:15 and their mood was “jubilant” because they were relieved to be flying out of the area despite the weather. When Anderson was quizzed by
Rave On!
in 1980 about a delay that developed at the airport, he explained that Peterson was having the flight “charted through the CAA.” Though Anderson noticed “snow blowing across the runway,” he looked up at the sky, noted that it was clear enough to see stars, and so failed to warn the young men of the danger of flying in such weather. Buddy asked about the distance to Fargo and was told it was 350 miles. Anderson later remembered that there was a pencil hanging by a string from a large wall map. Ritchie, the Bopper, and Buddy each measured the distance from their homes to Fargo—nine hundred miles for Buddy; one thousand miles for the Bopper; and almost two thousand miles for Ritchie.

Back in Clear Lake, Rod Lucier was still hoping to get the Moorhead show called off, but time was running out if he expected to stop the flight. The stars paid their fares, got back in the station wagon, drove onto the airfield, parked on the runway, and carried their luggage to the red and white Bonanza, which sat on runway 17, buffeted by the wind and looking more like a fragile child’s toy than an airplane. With Roger Peterson’s help, they crammed their bags into the small cockpit until it was cramped and uncomfortable.

The single-engine airplane, N3794N, had been in constant service for eleven years, with 1,238.20 hours of flying time, according to researchers Sue Frederick and Bill Griggs. A typical four-seat Beechcraft Bonanza model 35, it weighed 1,599 pounds empty and could carry 992 pounds. Its maximum speed was 184 miles per hour. Beechcraft had delivered it to the airplane sales division of the Butler Company of Chicago on October 23, 1947. N3794N was purchased on the same day by Dwight Rohn, who operated a flying service in Peoria. It had passed through four more, owners by 1954, when Robert Stout of Des Moines bought it for $6,243. Two years later Stout sold it for $4,425. It would have three more owners before ending up in Dwyer’s hangar at the Mason City Municipal Airport, Frederick later reported in
Reminiscing.

N3794N was in perfect condition, Dwyer’s mechanic, Charles McGlothlen, later told CAB investigator Van R. O’Brien. Since a recent overhaul, the plane had accumulated only forty hours’ engine time, McGlothlen added. Cerro Gordo County Deputy Sheriff Duane Mayfield had taken it up three days previously and pronounced it “fit,” Jeff Tecklenburg later revealed in the
Globe-Gazette.
As the musicians climbed aboard the aged aircraft, Anderson noticed “little spiffs” of snow, but again he raised no objection to the flight, even though such flurries often presage blinding storms. Sheriff Mayfield later confirmed that “snow showers” occurred on the night of the flight. As Alan Freed would later observe, “That Buddy Holly.… If you tied two orange crates together, put a wing on it, and said it would fly, he’d climb in and take off. He always wanted to get someplace ahead of the others.”

Suddenly Billie Rose and the other fans who’d tailed them from Clear Lake pulled up and started yelling and waving. According to
Globe-Gazette
reporter Douglas Hines, they were trying to “stretch their evening with the stars a little longer.” Billie Rose later described to Hines how the three singers prepared to board the plane as the kids yelled “like crazy teenagers.” The fans shouted “Hey, thanks for the show” and the stars “waved and yelled back,” Rose recalled.

Anderson later stated in
Rave On!
that the pilot was the first to enter the cockpit. Since the door was on the right front of the aircraft, Peterson crawled over to the pilot’s seat on the left side and said, “Holly, why don’t you ride abreast from me in the co-pilot’s seat.” Suddenly Buddy realized that he’d forgotten his briefcase. According to Anderson, he and Buddy went back to the station wagon and “picked it up.” At some point Buddy observed, “Who knows how long I’ll be on top,” Anderson later told interviewers Mike Oestreicher and Pat Kennedy. The stars finally shook hands with Anderson and then climbed into the cockpit. The Bopper sat behind the pilot, Ritchie was beside the Bopper, and Buddy was in front.

Leaning from the plane, Peterson exchanged a few words with Anderson, who was standing on the runway. If later reports are correct, there were several problems that should have ended the flight before it began. Peterson was completely ignorant of two alarming weather advisories, according to Goldrosen and Beecher. Visibility was going to be poor due to snow and fog in Iowa. It wasn’t any better in North Dakota; they were heading straight into a band of snow there. Additionally, Peterson was not as familiar with the plane’s instruments as he might need to be, given the poor weather that night. This was especially true since he had failed his latest instrument flight check test in 1958. Also, Griggs would report in 1989 that Peterson’s Airman’s Certificate stated unequivocally, “Holder does not meet night-flight requirements.”

Billie Rose later described the “beautiful snow” to reporter Douglas Hines but found it “really strange” when she considered “how treacherous” the skies were that night for flying. Despite these omens, Carroll Anderson closed the door and bid them “good luck,” Anderson later told UPI correspondent Dan Wilinsky. The clearance was given, and the plane taxied down the runway. According to the
Chicago Tribune,
Jerry Dwyer stood in the control tower. He was waiting for Peterson to call in his flight plan by radio, according to Griggs. Dwyer was under the impression that his pilot “had taken a nap” during the afternoon and was competent to fly, he later testified before the CAB. He and Peterson had checked weather conditions several times together before takeoff, Dwyer added. The wind was from the south, gusting at 35 miles an hour, Dick Mettler, manager of the Mason City Municipal Airport, later stated. The temperature was 18 degrees, the dew point 11 according to an investigation conducted later by Coroner Ralph E. Smiley, M.D. Peterson would never have taken the plane aloft “if there had been any doubt in our minds about the weather conditions,” Dwyer later told the CAB.

As the plane continued to taxi, Billie Rose pulled away in her car and sped off, heading for the Half Moon Inn, she later told Hines. On the runway, Peterson radioed the tower for additional information about the weather en route but received a briefing that was tragically “incomplete,” both the CAB and Sheriff Mayfield subsequently confirmed. Unaware of the danger ahead, Peterson told the tower that he would file a flight plan after he was in the air. Airport files revealed in 1993 that takeoff occurred at “0040-0100”—about one
A.M.
—Tuesday, February 3, 1959, from runway 17. Dwyer, in the tower, and Anderson, on the ground, both saw the red light of the plane turn and begin a northwest course, toward Clear Lake.

“Ironically,” a reporter from the
Lubbock Avalanche-Journal
later wrote, Rod Lucier, who was aware of the coming snowstorm, “telephoned the group’s agency Monday night trying to call off the next appearance. Meanwhile, the plane carrying the singers took off.”

Anderson climbed into his station wagon and drove away with Lucille and Tom. In the tower, Dwyer waited with mounting anxiety for Peterson to file his flight plan as promised. All that greeted him, as the coroner would shortly disclose, was radio silence. Two minutes after takeoff, Dwyer saw something he couldn’t believe. “‘It looks like it just went down,’ Dwyer reportedly said,” according to the
Chicago Tribune.
“The other man in the tower said no, it was just an optical illusion.”

But it wasn’t. The plane was going down, though Peterson thought it was going up, according to
Globe-Gazette
reporters Jeremy Powers and Jeff Tecklenburg. Larry Holley, a licensed pilot, later told Griggs, “In any Beechcraft Bonanza with a ‘V’ tail, if you have the nose down even slightly, it’ll pick up speed so fast that you’ll be going down before you know it.”

Peterson had encountered the weather front, which closed in on them just outside Clear Lake. As he flew into the snow, he may have lost visual reference. Though there were farmhouses in the fields below, nothing was visible but snow and eerie winter vapors. They were caught in a “terrible snowstorm,” Powers and Tecklenburg wrote.

In such cases, the pilot “can either go above or below the snow showers,” Sheriff Mayfield, a licensed pilot, later observed. The Bonanza “had an automatic pilot” and had Mayfield been flying the plane, he’d “have turned it on and climbed on top of the snow,” he said. But Roger Peterson “probably wound up underneath the snow shower and found himself too low,” he added.

Peterson looked at the gauges and tried to interpret them, according to a CAB report. His chronic vertigo may have compounded his confusion and caused him to read the gyroscope backward, so he thought he was accelerating up just as he went into a power dive. They were going to crash under full power. Down below, a few farmers stirred in their sleep, recognizing the sounds of a plane in trouble. Reeve Eldridge noted, “Woke out of a sound sleep by motor roar. Sounded smooth but pulling, as though climbing.” Another farmer, Delbert Juhl, said the “motor was working pretty good and he had it going pretty good, and that was the last we heard of it.” What these witnesses were hearing was a plane struggling to gain altitude. Peterson had perhaps realized his mistake too late and was trying to correct it, according to both Sheriff Mayfield and the current director of aviation at the Mason City Municipal Airport, Jerome J. Thiele.

Inside the cabin, there was likely a moment of nauseating panic as the ground rushed up at them. The young stars, idols of a generation, were more sure of their invincibility than ordinary mortals, but the unthinkable was happening. There was perhaps a second to blurt frantic prayers. They were facing one of the least desirable of ends;
The Book of Common Prayer
states, “Good Lord, deliver us from lightning and tempest, from earthquake, fire, and flood, from plague, pestilence, and famine, from battle and murder and sudden death.”

The plane came in level, Sheriff Jerry Allen later told Griggs. It hit the pasture at cruising speed, according to Bob Booe, a KCRG-TV employee from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who would view the wreck later that day. The recommended cruising speed was 172 miles per hour, Sue Frederick reported in her article, “The Airplane—N3794N.” At that speed, everyone on board must have died instantly. The landing gear was still retracted, according to FAA investigator Eugene Anderson. The position of the wheels offers strong evidence that Peterson was unaware that the plane was going down; and, therefore, that the crash was not an emergency landing. Upon impact with the ground, the fuselage split open instantly, Booe later told interviewer Kevin Terry. Buddy and Ritchie shot from the wreck like circus performers blasted from a canon, flying seventeen feet, according to the coroner’s report, and striking the ground with what must have been sickening thuds.

The crash was by no means over. The Bopper was still in the plane, which bounced out of the crater it had dug and continued across the field. The left wing snagged the ground and dug a furrow fifty feet long before crumpling off. The plane then cartwheeled and skidded through the stubble and snow until it was reduced to a ball. Five hundred and seventy feet from the point of impact, it finally crashed into the fence line, hurling the Bopper “40 feet from the wreckage, across the fence in a picked cornfield,” Coroner Smiley later noted. Only Roger Peterson remained in the plane.

Buddy’s head had slammed against the ground with such force that his skull cracked open from his forehead to his crown. Half of his brain tissue seeped down onto the rough stubble field. According to his death certificate, blood gushed from both ears. His face was disfigured by deep, jagged gashes. So many of his ribs were pulverized that the consistency of his chest was soft. His left forearm was fractured, his right elbow broken, and both of his thighs and legs had multiple fractures. “There was a small laceration of the scrotum,” wrote the coroner.