CLEAR LAKE, Iowa -- It's been 50 years between trips, but Monday night Mary Gerber of Walters, Minnesota was back at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa.
"I can remember that night standing here," says Mary from her spot on the dance floor about 30 feet from the stage.
Mary was 16, star struck and unaware that within hours Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and JP Richardson, the Big Bopper, would be dead in a plane crash just a few miles from the Surf.
The old ballroom still stands as a living monument to that night, but for 50 years no one has been able to produce a single photograph or piece of film the Surf's most significant event.
No one until Mary. "They're probably not the best pictures, but I didn't have a fancy camera back then."
The newly framed pictures now hang in the Surf's museum. Seven photos snapped by Mary that night at the concert - then tucked away. "You put them in a drawer. Your life goes on. You start raising a family."
The photos featuring multiple shots of Buddy Holly and Richie Valens on stage at the Surf are now public for the first time in 50 years after Mary saw an ad in the Albert Lea newspaper placed by a documentary film maker. "I didn't think they would ever be a big deal," she confesses. She couldn't have been more wrong.
"It's just incredible to have those," says Laurie Lietz, The Surf's executive director. "It gives us goose bumps, when we saw them it was unbelievable.
One shot of Dion and the Belmonts on stage is of particular interest to rock historians, though the uneducated will have to look close to see why. "Buddy Holly was playing drums," explains Mary, "because their drummer was on the bus, that froze his feet or something, so Buddy filled in for them as a drummer."
So why weren't there more cameras that night? At first Mary wondered that too. "And when I left the Surf that night I seen the sign, on the way out, it said 'no cameras allowed.'
Fifty years ago Monday night Mary Gerber broke the rules - and rock and roll history is richer because of it.
(Copyright 2009 by KARE. All Rights Reserved.)
