While much has been written about the tragic plane crash that killed music legend Buddy Holly and several others on an ill-fated flight from Clear Lake, IA in the early hours of Feb. 1, 1959, the singer and the other members of the “Winter Dance Party” tour had survived a potentially deadly situation only days before when their tour bus broke down in a remote section of northern Wisconsin in minus-30 degree weather.

 

The tour had played Duluth the night before, and was enroute to the next gig, a matinee in Appleton, WI.  Published reports had the bus stopping at the Southside Grocery Story in Hurley, WI.  The store was run by the Peltomaki family, who later recalled that the musicians were “very polite” when they stopped in, and that they had asked to borrow a fork to eat the canned meat they had bought for the trip.

 

The group then headed south on U.S. 51, but were only drove as far as the Town of Oma before the engine of the bus stopped working, stranding them on a particularly desolate stretch of highway deep in the Wisconsin northwoods.

 

I know this section of the Great White North especially well, since it is where I grew up, the family farm not a dozen miles from the site where Holly and his band-mates found themselves marooned.  I was seven years old then, and do recall hearing parts of the story from my Granddad and his cronies on the Iron County Sheriff’s Dept., who were called out to rescue the group.

 

My Great-Grandfather, “Old Tom” Hannula, was the first settler in Oma, with local newspaper accounts noting that he “took a heavy horse and a wagon-load of materials down an old cattle trail to construct the first dwelling in the area.”  And that was the house I grew up in, with “August 1, 1899” carved into one of the foundation stones.

 

“Oma” is a Finnish word that translates as “our own.”

 

It was the daughter of a friend of mine, one of our gang of farm kids that came to be known as the “Oma Mafia,” who posted an item on her Face book site in regard to Holly’s experiences that made me recall this story.

 

On the bus that night with Holly were his guitarists, future country music legend Waylon Jennings and Tommy Allsup, his drummer Carl Bunch, J.P. Richardson (aka “The Big Bopper”), Dion and the Belmonts and Frankie Valens, among others.  All were dressed in “light clothing,” according to the sheriff’s report, and the group had been burning newspapers inside the heater-less bus to try to survive as they waited for rescue.

 

Hurley garage owner Gene Calvetti was quoted as saying his father found the group “complaining about the cold and scared of bears” when they were finally rescued, though the bus could not be revived.  The musicians were taken by squad car to the Club Carnival on Hurley’s famous Silver Street, where the kitchen (and the bar) never seemed to close.  A tough old mining and logging town, the entertainment available in Hurley in 1959 bore little resemblance to the “gentlemen’s clubs” of today (a gentleman’s club then being the short bat the bartender used to keep order in his saloon.) 

 

In any event, it revived the band enough to see them on their way by train to Green Bay the next day, all except for Bunch, who spent a week in the Grandview Hospital with frostbite on both of his feet.

 

After playing a concert that electrified the audience at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, IA, Holly decided that he had had enough of unreliable tour busses and cold weather and decided to charter a plant to the next engagement in Moorhead, MN.  Jennings was scheduled to be on that flight, but opted to give his seat to Richardson, who had come down with the flu after his northern Wisconsin experience, and Allsup reportedly lost a coin flip for the final seat, which eventually went to Valens.

 

Shortly after takeoff, the Beechcraft Bonanza aircraft crashed in a farm field a few miles from the airfield, instantly killing 21-year-old pilot Roger Peterson and Holly, Richardson and Valens.  It became “The Day the Music Died” from the lyric to the Don McLean song “American Pie.”

 

The Buddy Holly Center in his hometown of Lubbock, TX contains many of the relics from his brief but meteoric career, and he is buried in the family plot in the city cemetery there.