Surf manager, last to see Buddy Holly, dies
The Globe Gazette ^ | PEGGY SENZARINO
02/22/2006
globegazette.com
a92461d140168216.txt
CLEAR LAKE — Former Surf Ballroom manager Carroll Anderson never got over the image of an airplane carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson as it left the Mason City Airport on Feb. 3, 1959.
It was Anderson who arranged the fateful flight to take the trio to their next engagement at Moorhead, Minn., after their appearance at the Surf Ballroom.
Anderson, 86, died Monday at the Muse Norris Hospice Inpatient Unit in Mason City.
He was manager of the Surf from 1950 to 1967.
“I took them to the airport and put them on the plane,” Anderson said in a 1995 Globe Gazette interview. “I closed the door of the plane and shook hands with each one of them.”
Anderson watched the plane take off and gain altitude. It appeared to Anderson that the plane flew over the horizon.
The plane, in fact, was falling out of the sky.
He learned the next morning that the plane had failed to check in at Alexandria, Minn., its first checkpoint. Then came the awful news of the fatal crash.
“I was hurt badly,” Anderson said in 1995. “It was something I couldn’t get over. Three young entertainers so full of life and they performed for you so magnificently.
“I’ll never get it out of my mind.”
Anderson’s wife, Lucille, said her husband talked a lot about those times and especially the plane crash.
“He really felt bad about it,” she said.
Anderson was inducted into the Iowa Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998.
After leaving the Surf in 1967, the couple owned and operated Carroll’s Cafe in downtown Clear Lake for seven years and then Anderson returned to carpentry work.
One of his great passions was the outdoors. His wife said he would spend two months in the spring and two months in the summer at a Canadian resort, working on various projects.
“He’d been coming here for 40 or 50 years, probably back before the roads were even in,” said Mark Mattice, part-owner of Pine Point Resort near Thunder Bay, Ontario.
“He was a good guy.”
Anderson served as a member of the Clear Lake City Council and was a long-time member of the Clear Lake Noon Lions Club.
“He was always friendly and a very distinguished gentleman,” said Mike Grandon of Clear Lake, a frequent customer in Carroll’s Cafe. |
