The Day the Music Died

A long, long time ago, a large jukebox hunkered in one corner of the cafeteria of the prep school I attended. With few exceptions, I don’t recall the songs on that wonder machine. I’m sure there wasn’t any Elvis, not in a school run by the good Fathers of St. Norbert, who held that vow of chastity close to their shriveled hearts.

There was some Buddy Holly, however, and I raced to play those songs nearly every lunch period my entire junior year. They helped season many of Miss Betty’s under-whelming lunch offerings (umami hadn’t been discovered yet), and they helped me to pretend I wasn’t a lonely teen-age broncin’ buck with a girlfriend who loved her virtue more than she loved me and, truth be told, probably more than I loved her. Who was keeping score when nobody was scoring?

What I can still remember is how that music used to make me smile. So as Buddy Holly sang “That’ll Be the Day” or “Peggy Sue” or “Rave On,” I survived lunch and looked forward to (or dreaded) the rest of the day.

Tuesday, February 3, 1959, held the promise of an early dismissal for a basketball game. The mighty Auks of Archmere Academy in Claymont, Delaware, would travel by bus to play St. Andrew’s Prep in Middletown, where twenty years later filming would wrap on an excellent Robin Williams movie,Dead Poets Society.

I liked playing the other prep schools on our schedule because a 5’7″ guard like myself would face equally challenged competition. When we played any of thepublic schools, we were “those faggots” from that sissy school where they stopped for tea each afternoon. That’s when I began to suspect that when people said ours was a classless society, what they really meant was that most of the members of our society had no class, especially the ones that went to public schools.

That February day sure make me shiver. The temperature was 25 degrees Fahrenheit when the team bus rolled into St. Andrew’s parking lot. I wasn’t in a hurry to get off because I had finally gotten warm during the forty-five minute ride from Archmere to St. Andrew’s. Thus, I was the last player to leave the bus.

Just then our center, Bob Patterson, drove into the lot, making all the noise that Paul Revere would have made had Paul Revere’s horse been equipped with a horn. Like Paul, Bob was agitated about something.

“Bad news,” he said. “I just heard on the radio that Buddy Holly died in a plane crash early this morning. The Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens died, too.”

“That’s it,” I said. “We gotta call the game off. How can they expect us to play basketball after hearing this?”

Despite my sincerity, my teammates did not share my sense of loss. God knows what they played on the jukebox at lunch time, if they played anything at all. For sure coach Vince thought I had lost the plot.

“You want us to turn the bus around, forfeit the game, and go back to school just because some singer died?” he asked, both eyebrows raised. “That’s one of your better ideas, Maggitti.”

Obviously coach did not believe that music could save your mortal soul

… but I did.

We lost that game to St. Andrew’s by a righteous margin—our two-three zone defense more porous than Miss Betty’s clam chowder. I scored four points, all from the free-throw line, and committed five fouls, one of which involved an ill-advised attempt to draw a charge from a kid built like a Frigidaire. But I wasn’t really playing that day. Not basketball, anyway.

That night I lay in bed with a transistor radio pressed to one ear, slowly turning the dial, hoping that the news had been wrong. That it had been some other Buddy, some other rockabilly dreamer in horn-rimmed glasses, who had taken that frozen plunge into an Iowa cornfield. But the reports never changed.

In the months that followed, the jukebox at school slowly retired Buddy Holly’s singles. Newer records with slicker production and less sincerity took their place, songs about sock hops and cars that could outrun  heartbreak.

I wasn’t interested. The magic had dimmed. The music didn’t make me smile the same way it used to. It couldn’t. A part of me had gone down with that plane—maybe the part that still believed youth was invincible, or that love could be unrequited but uncomplicated.

Years later, when I heard Don McLean sing about “the day the music died,” I didn’t just understand what he meant—I remembered what it felt like to be the last kid off the bus, huddled in a parka, on a cold February day.

Fortunately, I have since learned that the music never dies. It just finds new voices. But on that afternoon in 1959, it sure felt like music had been grounded for good. Maybe that was the day I started growing up. Not all at once, of course, I’m still working on that. But a little maybe. Rave On.