Posted on 02/01/2009 6:57:29 AM PST by Mobile Vulgus
The boy that was born two months after his famous father died in a tragic accident saw his father's face for the first time fifty years after the fatal day that stole the elder from our world.
How is that, you ask? Well, it may seem like one of those riddles or some exercise in logic but, no, I assure you it's quite true. And the truth of the matter makes for a fascinating story.
Jay Perry Richardson was born the same year that his father died in a horrible plane accident. In fact, Jay was still peacefully floating in the womb when that fatal day in 1959 came to take the life of his vital and well-known father. Young Jay never laughed with his father, never touched his face, never was taught to ride a bike by his dad and were it not for the heavily thumbed and faded photographs that his family so cherished of the man lost to time, young Jay wouldn't even know what his father looked like.
Unless... unless he looked in the mirror. Ah, that face he wore, he has been told, is the spitting image of his father's. That thought likely always warmed young Jay's heart.
He may not have known his father in person, but Jay was fascinated by his father's legacy nonetheless. Jay spent these fifty years of his life studying his father, talking to the many admirers that knew him, writing of him, and traveling the country to keep that memory alive. Even emulating what he knew of the man whose hand he never held, a man with whom he was never able to toss around a football, a man that missed being able to beam with pride at the good school grades of a boy he never knew.
Read the rest at Publiusforum.com...
“50 Years After His Death, The Boy Finally Meets his Father”
How could a boy do ANYTHING 50 years after he dies?
I went to youtube to listen to American Pie (cause the article made me want to hear that song)...found this video of Don McLean singing it on Imus. I guess he’s still performing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZszDTZKs_g
“And now you know........the REST of the story!”
Dads are important.
“There was one other thing that might be done during this exhumation. It seems that in the five decades since the elder’s death, some crazy conspiracy theories had been spun about how the man really died. So, Jay also hired a forensics expert to reassert the cause of death to dispel crazy rumors that had swirled about his father’s death for so long.”
“In due course the casket was raised and then the time came to open that aging box… and Jay was there. He was a bit afraid of how he might react. Would he be disgusted, afraid, happy, sad? He was told to prepare for little else but clumps of moldy clothing and dry bones. Not knowing how he’d react, Jay girded himself for the opening. But as that creaky lid was pried open there lay Jay’s father looking much as he did in life, almost perfectly preserved through the embalmer’s art. “
I just love ambivalent headlines. I try to avoid such sentences myself, but sometimes I fall into that trap myself :)
Bump
Richie Valens was only 17 years old when he died. I guess I hadn’t ever thought about it until now.
So sad.
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