-By Warner Todd Huston
It has been 57 years since the plane carrying rock stars Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and Jiles Perry “The Big Bopper” Richardson crashed into an Iowa cornfield on Feb. 3, 1959. It was memorialized as “The day the music died,” but the story has been a life-long event that haunted the world of the Big Bopper’s son, a boy who never met his famous father. But that total estrangement ended 50 years after the crash when that meeting finally took place in a strange but beautiful way.
The boy who was born two months after his famous father died in a tragic plane crash on the “Day The Music Died,” saw his father’s face for the first time, fifty years after the fatal day that stole the elder from our world.
How is this, you ask? This all may seem like one of those riddles or some exercise in logic but, no, I assure you it’s quite a true story. And the truth of the matter makes for a fascinating, if unlikely, story.
Jay Perry Richardson was born the same year his father died in a plane accident that was mourned around the world. In fact, Jay was still peacefully floating in his mother’s womb when that fatal day in 1959 came to take the life of his vital and well-known father. Young Jay never laughed with his father, never touched his dad’s face, never learned to ride a bike by his dad’s side and were it not for the heavily thumbed and faded photographs his family all so cherished, young Jay wouldn’t even know what his father looked like.
Unless… unless he looked in the mirror. Yes, that face he wore, he has been told, is the spitting image of his father’s. The thought likely always warmed Jay’s heart.
He may not have known his father in person, but Jay was always fascinated by his father’s legacy and felt close to him despite the distance between them. Jay spent those fifty years of his life studying his father, talking to the many admirers who knew him, writing of him, and traveling the country to keep his father’s memory alive. Even emulating what he knew of the man whose hand he never held, a man with whom he was never able to toss around a football, a man who missed being able to beam with pride at the many successes of a boy he would never know.
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50 Years After ‘The Day The Music Died,’ A Boy Finally Met His Long, Lost Father”
Iowa Congressman Bruce Braley is now running for the Senate in the Hawkeye State and he has a message for Iowans: Iowa farmers aren’t good enough for elected office. Iowa needs rich, lawyers like himself in office. At least, this is what he told a roomful of trial lawyers in Texas.
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What is a powerful, important, privileged Democrat member of the House of Representatives supposed to do when his House Gym towel boys have been furloughed? I mean are we to expect a high falutin member of Congress to get his own towel? SERIOUSLY? I mean, isn’t this far too much to expect of Representative Bruce Braley (D, Iowa)?
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Did Mitt Romney accidentally get 20 extra votes 
My friend Michael Bates has 
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