The only known surviving poster from 1959 Winter Dance Party at Riverside Ballroom is going up for auction. But first, its incredible story.
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GREEN BAY - John Daugherty was a 19-year-old Buddy Holly fan working at a local service station on Monroe Avenue and Main Street in 1959 when a concert poster from the Winter Dance Party at the Riverside Ballroom landed in his hands.
In the decades that followed, it hung in his bedroom in De Pere, survived a house fire in Howard, briefly went missing and eventually found its way to a collector in California.
Now, 64 years later, it’s the only known surviving poster from an unforgettable night of music forever etched in Green Bay rock ‘n’ roll history — Holly & The Crickets, Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson as The Big Bopper on the Riverside stage on a bone-chilling winter’s night on Feb. 1, 1959, for what would be the second-to-the-last show the young stars ever played.
Roughly 30 hours later, in the early hours of Feb. 3, all three were killed when the single-engine plane that was to take them from their show in Clear Lake, Iowa, to Moorhead, Minnesota, crashed in a farm field only a few miles from takeoff. It became known as "the day the music died," as immortalized in the Don McLean song “American Pie.”
On Nov. 19, the original poster from the tour’s Green Bay stop will be open for bids as part of Heritage Auctions’ Music Memorabilia & Concert Posters Signature Auction. “A priceless rock ‘n’ roll memento,” it’s expected to fetch six figures, said Pete Howard, director of concert posters for Heritage.
It’s only the third Winter Dance Party poster to ever come through Heritage Auctions in the 47-year history of the the world’s largest collectibles auctioneer.
Last November, a poster from the Feb. 3, 1959, show at the Moorhead Armory, which went on despite the deaths of its three biggest stars, sold for a world record-setting $447,000. Its price was undoubtedly bolstered by the fact it carries the same date as "the day the music died."
In 2020, Heritage offered what was then the first-known surviving poster advertising the Winter Dance Party, from the Jan. 25, 1959, show in Mankato, Minnesota. It sold for $125,000.
The poster from the Green Bay stop is special, because it’s the last one from a show that Holly played, Howard said. The stop at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake the next night, on Feb. 2, was a late addition to the itinerary on what was originally scheduled to be a rest night. It was advertised only with a last-minute ad in the newspaper. No posters.
“There’s only one Green Bay (poster) that has ever been discovered ... so it’s just as rare as you can get,” Howard said. “A standard rare concert poster means there might only be five or 10 or 12 and all the collectors sort of knock each other out for them. But this is just a hen’s tooth, much rarer than a needle in a haystack. It’s just an almost nonexistent artifact of rock ‘n’ roll’s first tragedy.”
Bumping into Buddy Holly in the bathroom at the Riverside
Daugherty was a year out of high school when he and a buddy went to see the Winter Dance Party at the Riverside Ballroom. The ill-fated tour had played Duluth, Minnesota, the night before and somehow made it to Green Bay in brutal winter weather, but not without a bus breakdown, frostbite that sidelined Holly’s drummer Carl Bunch and travel woes that forced the cancellation of a show earlier in the day in Appleton.
“Everybody loved Buddy Holly and his music. It was a pretty big deal,” said Daugherty, of Howard, about the Green Bay visit.
The two waited in a long line to get inside the ballroom — so long that by the time they got to the doors it was after 8 p.m., which meant they had to pay the full $1.25 price. Admission was 90 cents before 8 p.m. Daugherty remembers being upset about having to shell out the extra 35 cents.
“That was big money in those days,” he said.
Once inside, they worked their way up to the front stage so they could look up at Holly, Valens, The Big Bopper, Dion & The Belmonts and Frankie Sardo. If there were screaming girls in the crowd, Daugherty doesn’t recall.
“We didn’t pay much attention to that. We were too interested in the stars themselves.”
Then came the part of the night when fate stepped in, at the urinals of all places.
“My wife doesn’t like me to tell this story, but just shortly before one of the breaks, I had to go to the bathroom. I’m taking a whiz, and I look up and they had taken a break, and here’s Buddy Holly right next to me taking a whiz, so I got to talk to him in the bathroom.”
Like every other teen at that time, Daugherty wanted to be a rock star, so he told the 22-year-old Holly how he had a guitar and was trying to learn to play.
“He just encouraged me to keep it going. He said it’s a wide-open market, a lot of room for people,” Daugherty said. “Then I just told him I loved his music and he went back to playing again. That was kind of neat.”
Scoring two posters at Kick Morgan's Service Station
The morning after the concert brought another unexpected twist.
Daugherty worked at Kick Morgan’s Service Station, just down the way from the Riverside on Main Street, when a customer pulled in and asked for a wash. Daugherty opened the back door to vacuum out the car when he saw a stack of posters on the seat.
“Boy, I went to that thing last night. It was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Daugherty told the man.
“He said, ‘Well, would you like a poster or two?’ Not being greedy, I only took two,” Daugherty said. “It looks like I should’ve taken a lot more.”
As best as he can recollect, he gave the other poster to his buddy who went with him to the concert. The two lost touch a long time ago, and with that friend now deceased, Daugherty has no idea whatever happened to it.
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His, however, immediately went up on the closet door in his bedroom. He sunk thumbtacks partway into the door and then set the poster between them, so as not to put any holes in it. It hung there for several years.
When he got married and moved to Howard, he didn’t have a place to display it so it went in the basement game room on a shelf along with stacks of board games. When their son was 3 or 4, he pulled out a board game and put a small scratch in the poster that was underneath it.
“I told him someday this is going to be worth money. I was thinking like 150 bucks or something like that,” Daugherty said. “But then we put it away and kind of forgot about it.”
Parting with his poster for $20,000 after spotting a want ad
It wasn't until a house fire years later in the early 2000s forced the family out of the home for a time that the poster resurfaced. Daugherty and his wife were living with their son, Mike, while the house was being restored when one day while hauling the newspapers to the recycling bin, Mike happened to spot a want ad with the words “Buddy Holly.” A collector was looking to buy an original Winter Dance Party poster.
There was just one question: Where in the heck had Daugherty put his?
He went looking for it but couldn’t find it. It was his son who wondered, “Where would’ve Dad put that so I couldn’t get at it again?” and ultimately cracked the case. They found it in the box with one of Daugherty’s old electric horse race or football games of the 1950s.
It was Andrew Hawley, who has been collecting vintage posters for more than 35 years and is a well-known dealer, who had placed the want ad. After Daugherty called him, he took the next available flight out of California to come get it.
Daugherty and his wife met him at the airport in Green Bay, the precious poster wrapped in plastic. He paid them $20,000 for it.
“We had no idea how much $20,000 was. We had a brought a little satchel along (for the cash),” Daugherty said.
They used the money to buy their son a race car. He’s still racing today.
Winter Dance Party posters coveted for their rarity, mystique
Hawley is the consignor of the poster that’s expected to go for at least $100,000 at auction at ha.com/7309 during the music memorabilia auction Nov. 18-20. There is no minimum or reserve bid.
Winter Dance Party posters are considered some of the most coveted and rarest concert posters of all time, said Howard, who has been collecting for 30 years and working for Heritage for five years.
“More than 99.9 percent of music collectors will never have a Winter Dance Party concert poster,” he said.
The Winter Dance Party was unique in that it wasn’t a national tour. It was a regional trek that only played 11 dates in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa prior to the plane crash (and another 13 in Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Ohio and Kentucky after). Most collectors never had a chance at memorabilia and what little has survived is incredibly scarce.
“That makes it all the more rare and collectible and also gives it a mystique with just the snow and the winter in that part of the country,” Howard said.
The tragic history behind the tour also strikes a deep chord among collectors. It was a tour marred by one mishap after another, from a grueling schedule of nightly shows that required long stretches of travel on winter roads to broken-down buses with heaters that didn’t work to Bunch’s frostbite. It culminated with Holly chartering a plane to get from Clear Lake to Fargo, North Dakota, as the musicians jockeyed for the limited seats.
“Everybody really emotionally gets moved by this story, the whole backstory of the small plane, the changing seats at the last minute, the coin tosses and things like that. It’s got all the elements,” Howard said. “And this is all we have is the concert poster as a memento of the tragic tour.”
It also doesn’t hurt that the poster itself is “very handsome,” Howard said. It’s eye-catching with the yellow, black and white color scheme, and the prominence given to the venue up top, listing a hit song of each of the three top acts and the wording about "no blue jeans or slacks permitted" makes it a time capsule of the era.
Visitors to the Riverside Ballroom may recognize the same poster from a display of Winter Dance Party memorabilia that hangs in the lobby. Rest assured, that’s a replica, not an original, said owner Ken Tedford, who has worked at the 1929 ballroom for 45 years and owned it for the last 19.
On Feb 2, 2024, the Riverside will once again welcome John Mueller’s Winter Dance Party tribute show, just as it has for more than 25 years. It’s become such a treasured celebration of the Riverside’s role in Holly history, Tedford had people who attended the 60th anniversary event in 2019 come back to the ballroom the next morning before they caught their flight home.
“I just want to breathe the air in here one more time,” they told him.
There’s a sense of that same thrill surrounding the original 14-by-22-inch piece of cherished cardboard that is still standing all these decades after "Peggy Sue," "Donna" and "Chantilly Lace" rang out in the Riverside. Holly, a rock pioneer, would be 87 if he were still alive today.
“This poster has me excited as any poster I’ve ever handled,” Howard said. “I sometimes lie awake at night thinking about it or first thing in the morning when I wake up. It’s like what else can we do to get the word out to the world that this is the last known Buddy Holly concert poster where he actually played?”
As for Daugherty, despite the words of encouragement from Holly during their chance encounter, he never did become a rock star. He quickly learned he had “no musical talent whatsoever,” and Holly’s shocking death dimmed his interest.
He’s been in touch with Hawley as the poster is about to embark on the next chapter in its storied journey. At 83, he recently sat down and penned a handwritten note that documents his Holly encounter at the Riverside and how it was he got the poster. It appears with the listing on the Heritage website.
He has no regrets about selling the poster when he did for the amount he did.
“As long as it goes to a good home, I’m happy with that,” he said. “I don’t have any regrets at all. It was good for me, and I enjoyed it. It brought back a lot of memories.”
Kendra Meinert is an entertainment and feature writer at the Green Bay Press-Gazette. Contact her at 920-431-8347 or kmeinert@greenbay.gannett.com. Follow her on X (formerly Twitter) at @KendraMeinert.
This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Rare 1959 Winter Dance Party poster from Green Bay show set to auction
