Buddy Holly: Biography Read Online Free PDF

church was not always reflected in their home life. In 1951, when Buddy was fifteen and in his final year at Hutchinson Junior High, he came home from school and told his mother that he needed glasses. His mother’s response, by her own description, was scatterbrained. “He didn’t talk a lot, he was a quiet boy, and I didn’t pay him any mind,” she said. A few days later he again asked for glasses, and his mother again did nothing. All of her other children had demanded glasses, but when she’d taken them to the optometrist, “they didn’t need them very bad,” she explained. “I thought that this would turn out the same way.” The third time Buddy mentioned his vision problem, he at last got her attention.
    “Why do you think you need glasses?” she asked.
    “Because the school nurse examined my eyes and told me so,” Buddy said.
    An optometrist’s examination revealed that Buddy’s vision was 20/800 in both eyes. After the test the optometrist turned to Mrs. Holley and said, “This boy needs glasses pretty bad. He should have had them several years ago.”
    Buddy loved his mother, but sometimes she could be obtuse. His father left his parenting to Mrs. Holley and then complained that Buddy was “tied to his mother” by “his umbilical cords,” L. O. Holley later said in John Goldrosen and John Beecher’s book Remembering Buddy. Not equal to the job of handling the difficult, headstrong boy Buddy was, his mother left the job to her older son Larry. Buddy turned to Larry for guidance “on many things, some private,” Larry revealed in his autobiographical booklet “The Buddy I Knew!” “Buddy seemed to think that I hung the moon because I was an older brother and had been around a little.”
    It never seemed to have occurred to L.O. that if Buddy was a “mama’s boy” it was due to the absence of a strong father figure. The situation would have far-reaching consequences for Buddy, who would make the mistake of relying on stronger personalities who were not always trustworthy.

Chapter Two
    KDAV’s “Sunday Party”
    Around 1951, L. O. Holley was in charge of a construction crew putting up a house in Lubbock. One of the young men working for him as a carpenter’s helper, Jack Neal, was also a gifted musician. Born in Fort Worth, Texas, Neal had moved with his family to Tahoka on the South Plains in 1940 and then to Lubbock in 1942. He could play banjo, guitar, steel guitar, and piano, and his favorite singers were Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, Webb Pierce, and Ray Price. One day at work, during lunch break, Jack took his guitar from his car and joined the rest of the construction workers on the porch of the house they were building. He started to play and sing. L. O. Holley walked over to him and stood listening intently.
    “My son plays the guitar,” L.O. said as they started back to work. “It sounds like you oughta get together.”
    Neal met Buddy that evening and was immediately intrigued with his guitar playing. “We liked the toe-tapping type,” Neal later told Bill Griggs. “We had that feeling in our blood.” The pair sang some C&W and a couple of gospel songs and discovered that they sounded good as a duo. It was a period of musical growth that marked the beginning of Buddy’s dream to become a professional musician.
    Neal was also a lot of fun. Two years older than Buddy, he liked the rugged outdoors and knew his way around the South Plains, showing Buddy a side of life that was the birthright of every plainsman but remained foreign to many of the city folk of Lubbock, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Amarillo, and San Antonio, Texas’s major urban areas. Neal took Buddy to Tahoka, 110 miles south of Lubbock, where Jack still had relatives. They rode horses across the prairie and shot rabbits with their .22s. Sometimes they went fishing and duck-hunting. “We wore out the road going back and forth to Tahoka,” Neal said. A member of the Texas Wild Varmint Association,