Fifty Years ago in Pacoima

Planes Collide over Pacoima Junior High, January 31, 1957
I was just nine, but I remember it being a huge story: two planes colliding and falling from the sky onto a schoolyard where children were playing - a parent's worse nightmare, and many a kid's first awareness of random mortality. One student - Ricardo Valenzuela, was out of school, attending his uncle's funeral, that day - but legend has it that he (known to the world as Ritchie Valens), developed a fear of flying as a result - only to die, along with Buddy Holly, in the famous "Day the Music Died" small plane crash of February, 1959, at the age of 17.