Buddy Holly: Biography Read Online Free PDF Page B

Neal’s father encouraged the young men to go after bigger game, and soon they were bagging coyotes, foxes, and bobcats. On their way to shoot ducks one day, Buddy poked his rifle out the car window.
    “Look at that coyote,” he said, taking aim.
    Betraying a streak of cruelty, Buddy grazed the animal and “was tickled to death,” according to Neal, when the injured, disoriented creature started running around in circles. Fortunately, it managed to escape with its life, but only because Buddy “was too far away to hurt him,” Neal added. In some respects Buddy was a typical West Texan, especially when it came to guns.
    Buddy and Neal practiced their music as hard as they played. Both were passionate, compulsive aficionados of the guitar. Buddy’s style was “unique,” Neal told Griggs. In an interview with Philip Norman, Neal explained: “I played rhythm. Buddy played lead.… We’d go out to these black cafés on the other side of the tracks and just sit and listen. They mostly served barbecue, which we liked as well. He’d say, ‘Jack, I don’t want to be rich. I don’t even want to be in the limelight. But I want people to remember the name Buddy Holley.’” Buddy and Jack developed into such an entertaining C&W act that when Lubbock’s movie theaters announced a new policy of live entertainment for Saturday morning kiddie shows, they went onstage and had the children calling for encores. After that, they became a regular attraction. Proud of his ability to hold the attention of restless, fidgety tykes, Buddy, now pushing sixteen, began to think seriously of a singing career.
    During the blisteringly hot Texas summer of 1952, just before Buddy entered high school, the temperature regularly hit a hundred degrees in Lubbock. Overseas, the Korean War was raging. In Chicago, Ike won the Republican presidential nomination, and President Truman saluted the Democratic nominee, Adlai Stevenson. Millions of people were singing “High Noon” that summer and reading The Power of Positive Thinking. On September 7 Buddy turned sixteen and reported for his first day at Tom S. Lubbock High School, named after one of Texas’s Civil War heros. In a theme he wrote for his English class he expressed pride at being a Lubbock High Westerner. Standing in assembly with his classmates, he sang the school song, which exhorted the students to conquer the Texas plains, waving the Westerner banner of black and gold.
    “He was still just a little fellow, very short,” says Lois Keeton, who’d been his playground director during grade school recesses and was now his homeroom teacher at Lubbock High. “Buddy Holley was rather hyper—bubbly and vivacious,” she remembers. “He didn’t want to study. He bounced around in his seat, refusing to open a book. I worked with him gently, and after the first few days, he settled down.”
    On Wednesdays the homeroom students were expected to elect committees and set up programs as a way of learning organization and responsibility. Listless and lazy, Buddy’s class was so lacking in initiative that “Wednesdays came around too often for those kids to have a program ready,” Lois recalls. At Christmas they were allowed to have refreshments in addition to staging a program, but again no one made the necessary arrangements.
    “Well, it’s not too late—why don’t you go get us some refreshments yourself?” Buddy cheekily suggested to Miss Keeton. His charm was such that Miss Keeton trudged over to a grocery store across the street and loaded up on candy and cookies while the class, no doubt under Buddy’s direction, hastily improvised a Christmas program. “He was pretty bold to say that to me,” she says, laughing, recalling the incident over forty years later. “He was a bit of a smart aleck, but he was sweet. He wasn’t ugly or belligerent or I would have taken care of that. ”
    The winter of Buddy’s sophomore year, 1952–53, was frigid and violent throughout Texas and