He was only 15 when, the night after Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper died in that 1959 Iowa charter-plane crash, he was recruited to somehow help make the show go on at the tour's next stop in Moorhead, Minnesota.
This spring, the National Weather Service expects the river which bisects the Fargo-Moorhead region straddling North Dakota's and Minnesota's shared border to rise to the low end of the major flood range.