Donna Ludwig & Ritchie Valens — Donna

Published Jan 18, 2021, 5:01 AM

Los Angeles, 1957. In the time of drive-in movies and sock hops, high school student Donna Ludwig liked to sneak out of the house to have fun with her friends. On one night out, she met a young guitarist named Richard Valenzuela and was immediately smitten. As Ritchie Valens, he would have a chart-topping hit with a song he wrote for her, before his life was tragically cut short.

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About a Girl is the production of I Heart Radio and Double Elvis. You know about Ritchie Valens, the seventeen year old pioneer of early rock and roll whose career was just beginning at the time of his tragic death in a plane crash. But this is not about Ritchie Vallens. This is about his high school classmate, the girl he loved and the subject of a song that would become a number two Billboard hit, Donna Ludwig. This story is about a girl. Yeah. The first time she ever saw him. It was at a car club party, teenagers drinking beer and showing off their custom rebuilt vehicles in the smoky San Fernando night. The hosting club was the Igniters, one of the many hot rodder clubs in town. There were the poor Boys and the road Kings, and lost Angels and the lazy gents. Boys were jackets with names and blazoned on them and slipped back their hair. Donna's father owned a Packard dealership in Beverly Hills where he sold respectable luxury cars to respectable rich men. But hot rods were more Donna style. She was a rebel, a leader of the pack with her blonde hair cut boy short. It was seven and she was fifteen, coming of age during the first rock and roll era, one of the most exciting times to be a teenager in America. She'd come with a day to night and he was clearly already drunk, but she wasn't paying that much attention to him. Instead, she was looking at the boy playing the guitar. She thought she saw him looking at her too, in between strums, and she wanted him to keep looking. She'd seen him before in the halls at school, carrying around his guitar. She knew he liked music, but not much else. She didn't know he was this good, as good as any other rocker at the top of the charts. Then the boys started playing another song, We Belong Together. He's sang it in a sweet, husky voice, and he's sang it directly to her, looking right in her eyes the whole time. That was when her day passed out. She didn't see the boy with a guitar for the rest of the summer, but when school started again, she ran into him in the hallway. This time she asked his name, Richard Valenzuela. He told her Ritchie. He spoke with a slight accent. His family was from Mexico, but he lived his whole life in California. She just wanted him to keep talking to her. It seemed like he had the same idea. He didn't waste any time. Would you like to go to a movie? Of course she did. They didn't take long for Donna to fall for Ritchie. On one of their first dates, he told her that he was going to make it big as a musician, and he was going to buy a house for his mother. He cared a lot about his family, it seemed his mother and his siblings. He didn't smoke, he didn't drink. He was well mannered. Donna was taken by his quiet self possession, and maturity in such contrast with most of the boys. She knew. Richie's mother Conscha like Donna well enough to teach her to cook Richie's favorite meals, tamales minudo and Enchilada's. Donna's packard dealing father did not like Richie, though he wouldn't have as well brought up daughter dating some Mexican. Donna the rebel, didn't give a damn what her father thought. She'd sneak out of the house to meet Ritchie, and they'd go skating, or to a diner or the movies, simple things, just the two of them. Boyfriend and girlfriend. At school, they meet up between classes. They would walk in the rain, arm and arm with her head on his shoulder. She didn't haale his scent, clean and masculine soap, an old spice. He'd grown up surrounded by music mar Yachi bands, Flamenco, rhythm and blues, and the beginnings of rock and roll. He'd always wanted to make music of his own. He could play guitar right handed, even though he was otherwise a lefty, as well as the trumpet and the drums. There was only one chink in the cool confidence he wore, an anxiety stemming from something that had happened earlier the same year. In January, an Air Force fighter jet had smashed almost head on into a small commercial plane in the air over San Fernando, reigning debris on the neighborhood below. The small commercial plane had nose dived after the crash, spiraling right into the playground of Richie's junior high school. Three students were killed, along with all four of the plane's crew. The impact of craters in the schoolyard. Richie hadn't been at school that day. He'd been excused to go to his grandfather's funeral. It was terrifying to him that he might just as easily have been killed along with those three students, or he might have been one of the seventy five who were injured. He still had nightmares about it. I don't think I'll ever get on a plane, he told her. It was scary to think about the random nature of these things. Anything could happen or go wrong in a moment, and there was no way to predict it. Sometimes there was no explanation for an accident other than tragedy. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Richie kept playing gigs around town whenever he could get them. He was already known as the Little Richard of San Fernando. His talent was such that words soon reached Bob Keene, the owner of a small record label called Delphi, who came to hear Richie play at a Saturday morning matinee at a movie theater. He thought the kid had something. It was Keene who decided he should perform with the nickname Richie because there were already a lot of Richard's Little and otherwise in the music business, and his last name, Valenzuela, sounded too ethnic. No DJ was going to put a Chicano on the air, so Valenzuela became Valance. Keene helped Ritchie Valens cut a two song record and it did well. Come On, Let's Go became a top fifty hit in the summer, and when school started again in the fall, Ritchie wasn't there, deciding to drop out in favor of recording and touring. Keene booked him for a love and concerts in loven cities across the US. He had to swallow his fear of flying to get through them all. For Donna, it meant no more meetings with Ritchie between classes, no more sneaking. Now to kiss at the roller rink. In October, Donna watched Ritchie appear on the hugely popular TV show American Bandstand. There he was in black and white, shaking ends with Big Clark. By then, he and Donna had decided they should just be friends. He was too busy for a relationship and they were too young to be serious. She didn't think they'd end up together in the long run either. She thought he was going to be famous, and that would be that. Still, she missed him. He called her one night. It was late in San Fernando, but still early evening in Honolulu, where Keen had taken him for yet another concert. Donna, I want to play something for you. It's a new song I wrote right now. Yes, I want you to be the first person to hear it is Is that all right? Donna said that it was, and then he started to sing. But it wasn't just any song. It was her song. She held the phone tightly in her hand that she listened to Ritchie crooning in her name over and over, his voice caressing the syllables like something precious. When he was finished, she had tears in her eyes. Richie, she said quietly, I love it. It didn't matter that their relationship had ended, or that he was miles away across the ocean. At that moment, in the middle of the night, she was a girl and a song a boy had written for her, and that was a wonderful thing to be. She had no idea then that he was planning and recording it. So months later, when she was driving with friends and heard a familiar voice come on the radio, it was a total shock. Donna could barely hear the radio over the shrieks of a car full of teenage girls, but there was no doubt from the first words. It was the song Richie had song to her over the phone, her name on the radio. It was surreal, something small, all in private, made larger than life, Bigger than she had ever imagined. By New Year's the song was everywhere. It seemed like Richie's voice was singing her name on every radio in America. It was his breakout hit, hurtling up the charts, the official soundtrack to the Winter of She heard from him again in January. He was back in Los Angeles, he told her over the phone, but he would be leaving again soon for a package tour they were calling the Winter Dance Party. He'd be playing at dozens of venues all over the Midwest, and he'd heard it was going to be freezing cold, which he wasn't looking forward to. But get this, buddy, Holly was going to be headlining. Ritchie was so excited to meet him. His family was going to throw him a party before he left. Obviously, she was invited. He missed her. Her father said no, and there was no way she was going to be able to sneak out this time. It was frustrating, but Donna reminded herself that one day she wouldn't live in his house anymore, and she started to count down the days until she would be free. When she told Ritchie she wasn't going to be able to make it, he was disappointed, but he said he understood and they could always hang out when he came back from the tour. He left, and for a few weeks she was back to her usual routine until February three, a Tuesday. At some point that morning, she started to hear murmurs in the hall about Ritchie that he was dead. But Donna's mind shut this down immediately and she shrugged it off as another ridiculous rumor. There was always some story about him going around the school. One classmate told her directly, Richie's dead, Donna, Buddy Holly and the Bopper are dead too. They were in a plane and it crashed. Donna still didn't believe it, but it's all over the news. Later, one of her teachers turned on the radio, and that was when she understood the terrible truth. She stayed home from school for a while. She wanted to be alone with the heartache she felt with a mystery of Ritchie disappearing from the world. It didn't feel real. It was as if he was still on tour. She couldn't believe that Ritchie was never coming home. But never duck his head as she tried to smooth back his hair, never let her slip her hand into the crook of his arm, Never laugh again, never sing her another song. No one she knew had ever died before. She'd never had to think about never before. Now that he was dead, Richie was more popular than ever. There was nothing that the American public loved like a handsome young singer. With the tragedy of the plane crash, a legend was forming around him, the story of a young musician cut down just as he was on the way up. Donna the song moved up another notch to number two on the Billboard Hot one hundred. Whether she liked it or not, she was being wrapped into the legend. With America hungry for more details, The press quickly sniffed out that the Donna of the hit song was a real girl in San Fernando. Now the story was even better. It was tragic and romantic, a rock and roll Romeo and Juliet. Donna started getting letters by the thousands from fans all over the country who wanted her to know how sorry they were about her loss, or wanted to know what kissing Ritchie had really been like, or just wanted to feel closer to a Ritchie that they had made up in their heads. Reporters wanted to know all about her romance with Ritchie. Have they really been in love? Have they planned on getting married? Photographers took photos of her, manipulating her to sell their narrative, posing or holding Richie's picture, kneeling beside record players as if she was listening to his voice. In one picture, she leaned against a mailbox, the hood of her sweatshirt pulled tightly over her head. She wasn't in the mood for any of it, but people loved this projection of vulnerability. She felt most comfortable with Richie's family, his mother Concha and his sister Connie. At least their grief was for the real Ritchie, not some imagined version of him. Richie should have celebrated his eighteenth birthday. Instead, Donna went to a simple solemn memorial service that his family helped for him. There was a woman there who introduced herself as Diane Olson and told the violence well a family that she and Ritchie had been engaged. Donna wasn't sure if she was a hanger on or she'd actually dated Ritchie. It wasn't impossible he'd been away so much, and if he'd had a girlfriend done to her, Donna would have been the last person to know. Richie's family took also at her word, and she moved in with Connie, But two months later she disappeared for good. Maybe the woman had just been trying to hustle Richie's family. It seemed like everyone was trying to profit off his death. Another band, the Kittens, even recorded a version of Richie song, using the same melody with the words they made up. It was called Letter to Donna. The lyrics assured her that Richie had loved her dearly to his very last day, that it was her inspiration that made him a star. It was pretty gross. Even her father, who had never liked Ritchie, decided he could at least make some money off his death. He pressured Donna into recording a two song record on the Pop label. Both songs were about how sad Ritchie's death was now that you're gone and lost without you. She only agreed after she got it in the contract that any profits would go to Concha Valenzuela. Donna wasn't a singer, and on the tracks her voice sounds thin and flat. She sings without much conviction. The record didn't sell. She felt mortified about the whole thing. The day she turned eighteen, she moved out of her father's house. She never visited him again. She was on her own now, but being the donna Richie's donna wasn't over. She found work as a nightclub hostess in l a and one of the other girls told a patron who she was. It was Read West, one of Elvis Presley's body men. West called her up one night and asked her if she wanted to go on a date with Elvis. The King was known to dighteen age girls, but when she arrived at his penthouse at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, all he wanted to do was ask her questions about Ritchie. Had Richie known how to read music, had he written his own songs? It was as if he was comparing himself to arrival. Even though Ritchie was dead and had never reached Elvis levels of success. She went on other dates with other boys in the year after. When she turned nineteen, she married one. He was a musician just like Ritchie and even looked a little like him. Donna would later think her hasty marriage was just a way of coming to terms with what had happened. A decade later, the musician Don McLean wrote about the day Ritchie died. His seminal eight and a half minute single, American Pie was a tribute to a time of national innocence, an idealized era of purity wrapped up in the passions of adolescence and paired away by the upheaval of the sixties. When the song was released, many were too young to remember that horrible day in ninety nine, and of course the song spoke directly to Donna. It was impossible not to think of Ritchie when she heard it on the radio, and she heard it often. By the following summer, it had become a number one hit, and everyone wanted to know about Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie valence again by music had changed so much that she didn't think anyone still cared about Ritchie. That was when she got a script for a movie about Richie's life to be called La Bomba. The studio and the director, Louis Faldis, wanted her to consult. The first script hadn't been right at all. Richie was painted as a tough guy, and in relity he hadn't been like that, and there are too many sex scenes between her and Ritchie, she supposed. She wasn't surprised that Hollywood productions would always embellish to make things more exciting, more salacious than they had ever been in reality, but it offended her, and Donna wasn't shy about how she felt. In reality she and Ritchie had never gone all the way. He'd been a great kisser, but that was all. She told the studio that she needed reassurance that they would change it. She would contact a lawyer if she needed to. But Vada's shifted course in the day of the movie premiered, Donna's stomach was not She wasn't sure what to expect. It was something minor, a brief scene where she and Ritchie went to a drive in that got her. The coke bottles the actors playing them had were just right, she remembered it so vividly she ran out into the hallway to I La Bamba. Proved to be a box office success. It was praised by the influential film critic Roger Ebert, and the next year it was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture Drama. More important than that, however, was that it brought ritchie story and his music to a new generation. Sometimes Donna would dream of Ritchie. Most times it would be the Ritchie she knew, but other times it would be Lou Diamond Phillips, the actor who had betrayed him in the movie. And then Donna would wake up feeling foolish. You knew Ritchie, She'd have to remind herself, not Lou. People would ask her every so often if he was the love of her life. She knew they wanted her to say yes, but she couldn't not if she was being honest. She'd liked Ritchie a lot, she'd care to about him, but love was what she felt for her mother, and her sister and her brother. She had been fifteen years old, for heaven's sake, what had she known about love? Tell me about your life since those halcyon days of the rock and roll Era, a British newscaster, asked her. It was two thousand and six. Donna was wearing a royal blue dress. Her hair was still the way it had always been, a short blonde crop. She was standing in the studio next to Peggy Sue garin Buddy Holly's Peggy Sue. Over the years, so many people had wanted to interview them together that they become friends. When Peggy Sue's husband was marketing his drain clearing service, the Rapid Reuter, Donna had done a commercial for them. What had her life been like? Well, in a lot of ways, it had been normal. Donna was on her third husband in the third time. She like the charm, and she had two daughters. They've grown up bragging to their friends about how their mom had a song written about her, even if the friends had no idea who Richie Valence was. She'd become a manager at a mortgage company in a Sacramento suburb. She'd stay at the same tough tomboy she'd always been, holding her own with the men she worked with. She liked her career. She never went out of her way to tell people who she was, but they would inevitably find out and ask her what it was like to be a part of rock and roll history. She couldn't tell them. Richie was the one who had made history. She was just someone who known him for a little while. As the years passed, however, she thought that she understood it more. Richie's career in Earnest had only lasted for eight months. If he had not gotten on the plane that night, she thought he would be even more of a legend, on the level of Elvis, Chuck Berry and the many others they listened to back in their days of innocence. Undoubtedly, but he touched the world in his time, inspired countless people, and she was one of the lucky few who have known him, to have had his friendship, his love, and to have inspired him. For many she was a tangible connection to him. Every February, the Surf Ballroom and clear like the last place Richie ever performed. All the memorial concert, impersonators of Ritchie, Buddy Holly, and the Big Bopper would play their music. They invited Donna, and she gamely showed up. For several years. It was a nice time. Well, it was weird to see look alikes to the long dead teenager she dated up on the stage. For a moment, the three of them would be alive again, evoking the joyful memory of that time before the music died, only a few miles away, at the very spot the plane had crashed and memorial had been erected, three vinyl records and a guitar etched in metal for three names. Every year there were flowers, notes, anything. Fans stopping by to pay their respects felt compelled to leave. Richie had only been seventeen when he died. Though his career has been barely a year, it had included to hit records. Such promise left unfulfilled. Where might Richie have gone? Who could he have become? His family, friends and fans could only speculate, But in the brief time that he did have, he left an enduring mark on the music world. Because the music hadn't really died on February third, n It had just begun. People come to me and say, you're Richie Valence, Donna, and that's important because they haven't forgotten, she said in an interview. Richie Valen's dedication to his craft at an early age paid off when his dreams burst forth into reality, resulting in the sadly brief but remarkably fruitful and influential career. Millions who never knew him, plus generations to come became captivated by his legend and enthrall of his music. But this isn't about them. This is about Donna Ludwig, just a high school student whose first young love happened to be a gifted musician, a boy who always reached back for her on his way to stardom. This is About a Girl About a Girl comes to you from Double Elvis and was executive produced by Jake Brenning and Brady Sadler. It was created, written, and narrated by Nick Norwells, with additional writing and editing by s I raised Brom. Scott Janovits is the show's producer and mixer and provides music and editorial support. Audio editing by mc dame. If you like the show, please subscribe to About a Girl on the I Heart Radio, Last Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review. For more great shows from Double Elvis, wes at Double Elvis dot com dot's Double Elvis dot Com m

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