Skip to main content

That Was The Day

March 2023
1min read

My dance with a future legend

It was the Summer of 1957, before my senior year at Carlsbad High School in New Mexico. The weather was hot and my friends and I were bored. The only excitement was a dance at the Elks Club Ballroom sponsored by the cheerleaders at my school. They usually hired local talent, but this time they had taken the suggestion of Roy Rucker and Buddy Shirley, two students who had transferred from Lubbock, Texas. Roy and Buddy knew a band whose star was rising, a group led by another young man named Buddy. The band charged the cheerleaders $500, which seemed like a lot. Waiting in the long line to get into the dance, though, I heard someone in front of me say the band could have charged even more: Buddy had opened for Elvis Presley twice.

The big hall was packed. The band’s glorious pounding went on for an hour before the musicians went on a break and the jukebox took over for the dancers who didn’t want to rest.

I was talking with some other girls when someone tapped me on the shoulder, grabbed my hand, and led me out onto the floor. Maybe he picked me because I had dark-framed glasses like his. I hadn’t danced much so far, and I was thankful for the invitation. I was also grateful because later I could tell my students, children, and grandchildren about the night I danced with Buddy Holly.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "November/December 2005"

Authored by: The Editors

Forty years ago a pair of college students conjured up the earliest form of computer dating

Authored by: Hugh Rawson

“Filibuster”

Authored by: The Editors

Cowboy Buckles

Authored by: The Editors

We set the sixteenth President straight

Authored by: The Editors

Zorro

Authored by: The Editors

One of the Renaissance master’s best designs is in Grand Rapids

Authored by: The Editors

An audacious new book offers intimate glimpses of 2,500 years of strife

Authored by: The Editors

A recent volume gives the horrifying details

Authored by: Terry Golway

The people who stand ready to trade their lives for ours are part of a tradition that goes back 400 years

Authored by: Andrew Coe

Against this enemy, courage alone is not enough. From the beginning, firefighters have had to find ways to climb higher, shoot water farther, spot fires sooner. Here are some of the milestones in the history of fire-extinction technology.

Featured Articles

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.