Carl Bunch, 71, a drummer for Buddy Holly and the Crickets who was in the hospital with frostbite when Holly and other members of the Winter Dance Party Tour were killed in a 1959 plane crash, died March 26 in Antelope Valley, CA from complications from diabetes.
Bunch, then 19, thought of the tour as an audition for a permanent position with the band, he told the LA Times in 1993. He joined the tour weeks before the tour bus broke down Feb. 1, 1959, in a Wisconsin snowstorm, and he ended up with frostbitten feet. Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. "the Big Bopper" Richardson died two days later in a plane crash.
"I couldn't believe it," Bunch said, "I couldn't see Ritchie dead. We had become close."
Bunch rejoined the tour for its final days and then joined the Army. He later played for a time with Roy Orbison and Hank Williams Jr.
Born Nov. 24, 1939, in Big Springs, Texas, Bunch took up the drums as a teenager to help recover from leg surgery.
In the 1980s, he earned degrees in theology, biblical counseling and psychotheology from Friends International Christian University in Merced. He ran a Christian ministry and was a substance-abuse counselor before poor health led him to retire in the early 1990s.
A father of three, he was married to his wife, Dorothy, for 44 years.
In 2000, Bunch played drums in a re-creation of the 1959 tour and signed autographs as "the Frostbitten Cricket."
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