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At 11:17 a.m., Jan. 31, 1957, the skies over the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles were clear, with just a few wispy cirrus clouds disrupting their azure expanse. Far below those clouds, on the athletic field of Pacoima Junior High School, approximately 220 students — mostly boys — were nearing the end of their gym class activities.
One minute later, death rained from those still, blue skies.
The boys on the field first heard it coming. A brand new Douglas DC-7 four-engine airliner was screaming down at a steep angle, debris pouring off its shuddering frame like fleas from a dog on fire. At first, it seemed it would pass narrowly over the field.
But then the fuselage clipped the nearby Pacoima Congregational Church and skidded into the athletic field, tearing up huge mounds of macadam and spewing hundreds of gallons of flaming jet fuel in every direction. Boys who had moments earlier been yelling, laughing, playing kickball, now ran for their lives, trying desperately to scale the wire fence between the field and an elementary school next door.
Many didn’t make it. Two boys were killed instantly; a third held on for a day before dying at a nearby hospital. A few youngsters lost limbs. Others suffered massive burns. (One boy was asked by the authorities how he took his clothes off. “I didn’t take them off,” he said. “They were burned off.”)
One Pacoima student wasn’t at school that day, having taken the day off to attend his grandfather’s funeral. He had just returned with his family to their Pacoima home when they heard the explosion and saw the plane plummet over the horizon. They jumped into their car and followed the fuliginous trail left by the doomed airliner to the site of its awful destruction.
As 15-year-old Richard Steve Valenzuela watched desperate mothers running from one blanket-covered body to the next, amid gnarled, still-steaming wreckage, he felt he had been spared somehow — that if he hadn’t gone to his grandfather’s funeral, he would have been among the groaning victims of this horrifying accident.
It was only 19 months after he stood watching his classmates writhe on the scarred athletic field of Pacoima Junior High that Valenzuela was shooting up the charts with his first single, “Come On Let’s Go,” under the shortened moniker of Ritchie Valens. He soon followed that hit with the one-two punch of “Donna” and its smash B-side, “La Bamba.”
In January 1959, Valens joined the Winter Dance Party tour with fellow rockers Buddy Holly, Dion and the Belmonts and the Big Bopper. The bus used to transport the musicians from one gig to the next on the 24-day tour was cold and uncomfortable.
So when Holly booked a plane to fly his band from Clear Lake, Iowa, to Fargo, N.D., on Feb. 3, 1959, Valens overcame the fear of flying he had developed following the Pacoima Junior High tragedy and flipped a coin with Holly’s guitarist, Tommy Allsup, for his seat on the plane.
In the moment when that coin spun at the top of its arc, 17-year-old Ritchie Valens was likewise at the top of his career. But like that DC-7 two years earlier ... like the coin on which he unwittingly bet his life ... like the tears that flowed for years thereafter ... later that night, Ritchie Valens and the other rock luminaries on that Beechcraft Bonanza came down.
Notes is supported by the Gay & Lesbian Fund for Colorado, promoting the success of after-school programs throughout Colorado in cooperation with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. Notes can be heard daily on KAFM 88.1 or at kafmradio.org on the Web.
One minute later, death rained from those still, blue skies.
The boys on the field first heard it coming. A brand new Douglas DC-7 four-engine airliner was screaming down at a steep angle, debris pouring off its shuddering frame like fleas from a dog on fire. At first, it seemed it would pass narrowly over the field.
But then the fuselage clipped the nearby Pacoima Congregational Church and skidded into the athletic field, tearing up huge mounds of macadam and spewing hundreds of gallons of flaming jet fuel in every direction. Boys who had moments earlier been yelling, laughing, playing kickball, now ran for their lives, trying desperately to scale the wire fence between the field and an elementary school next door.
Many didn’t make it. Two boys were killed instantly; a third held on for a day before dying at a nearby hospital. A few youngsters lost limbs. Others suffered massive burns. (One boy was asked by the authorities how he took his clothes off. “I didn’t take them off,” he said. “They were burned off.”)
One Pacoima student wasn’t at school that day, having taken the day off to attend his grandfather’s funeral. He had just returned with his family to their Pacoima home when they heard the explosion and saw the plane plummet over the horizon. They jumped into their car and followed the fuliginous trail left by the doomed airliner to the site of its awful destruction.
As 15-year-old Richard Steve Valenzuela watched desperate mothers running from one blanket-covered body to the next, amid gnarled, still-steaming wreckage, he felt he had been spared somehow — that if he hadn’t gone to his grandfather’s funeral, he would have been among the groaning victims of this horrifying accident.
It was only 19 months after he stood watching his classmates writhe on the scarred athletic field of Pacoima Junior High that Valenzuela was shooting up the charts with his first single, “Come On Let’s Go,” under the shortened moniker of Ritchie Valens. He soon followed that hit with the one-two punch of “Donna” and its smash B-side, “La Bamba.”
In January 1959, Valens joined the Winter Dance Party tour with fellow rockers Buddy Holly, Dion and the Belmonts and the Big Bopper. The bus used to transport the musicians from one gig to the next on the 24-day tour was cold and uncomfortable.
So when Holly booked a plane to fly his band from Clear Lake, Iowa, to Fargo, N.D., on Feb. 3, 1959, Valens overcame the fear of flying he had developed following the Pacoima Junior High tragedy and flipped a coin with Holly’s guitarist, Tommy Allsup, for his seat on the plane.
In the moment when that coin spun at the top of its arc, 17-year-old Ritchie Valens was likewise at the top of his career. But like that DC-7 two years earlier ... like the coin on which he unwittingly bet his life ... like the tears that flowed for years thereafter ... later that night, Ritchie Valens and the other rock luminaries on that Beechcraft Bonanza came down.
Notes is supported by the Gay & Lesbian Fund for Colorado, promoting the success of after-school programs throughout Colorado in cooperation with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. Notes can be heard daily on KAFM 88.1 or at kafmradio.org on the Web.
