CPT Spirits in the Sky - Buddy Holly, The Day the Music Died

If February 3, 1959 was the day the music died when Buddy Holly was killed in a plane crash in Iowa, then September 7, 1936 was when the music came alive at his birth.  What a decade preceded the birth of Buddy Holly, especially when it came to American icons.

Marilyn Monroe was born June 1, 1926, James Dean February 8, 1931, Elvis Presley January 8, 1935 and Buddy Holly September 7, 1936.  All would grow to dominate the entertainment industry and all would die way too early in life.  Their respective ages were Buddy Holly 23, James dean 24, Marilyn Monroe 36 and Elvis 42.

Buddy Holly was popular for all of two years while alive, 1957 - 1959 and during that time he created a remarkable body of work so extensive that new Buddy Holly albums were released until ten years after his death, in 1969.

Among entertainers citing Buddy Holly as a major influence on their careers were the Beatles, Elvis Costello, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan.  Rolling Stone magazine ranked Buddy number 13 on its list of the 100 greatest artists of all time.  He was one of few white entertainers to ever appear at the Apollo Theater in New York City performing shows August 16-22, 1957.

In perhaps an indication of his awareness that he had little time on Earth not only did he stockpile a wealth of recordings but he met his wife to be, Maria Elena Santiago in NYC and proposed on the first date, married her two months later, and died six months later.  She had just discovered she was pregnant and canceled touring with him.  Within 24 hours of hearing of his fatal plane crash on the news she had a miscarriage and lost their child.

Buddy, parents & Maria Elena

The following is an article written by Alan Hanson comparing the careers of Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley.

Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley Comparisons

by Alan Hanson

“Buddy Holly could have been a country singer, or pop crooner, could have and probably would have fitted his talent to whatever music was happening when he came along. It happened to be rock ’n ’roll. But it only fully became rock ’n’ roll the day Buddy Holly started singing it.” —Paul Williams in his book, “Rock ’n’ Roll: The 100 Best Singles”.

Elvis center Buddy far right

Paul Williams may have been over stating things a bit, but Buddy Holly certainly earned his currently accepted status as one of rock ’n’ roll’s founding fathers in the late fifties. In 1986, Buddy and Elvis Presley were both named charter members of the newly established Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The two men had many other things in common. Both were born in the deep south and raised in poverty. Early contact with country music and rhythm and blues stimulated their youthful, creative musical spirits. There were obvious differences, as well. Buddy looked like the typical boy next door, while Elvis’s smoldering looks oozed sexiness. Holly was an accomplished guitar player and songwriter; Elvis was neither. On stage, Presley’s voice and energy were boundless, while Buddy depended more on instrumentation and his unique “hiccup” vocal style.

Elvis Presley was born on January 8, 1935, in Tupelo, Mississippi. Buddy Holly was born a year and a half later on September 7, 1936, in Lubbock, Texas. Coincidentally, the currently accepted definitive biographies of both men were published a year apart—Peter Guralnick’s Last Train to Memphis in 1994 and Ellis Amburn’s Buddy Holly: A Biography in 1995. Most of the following references to Holly’s life and career come from the Amburn volume.

• Family backgrounds were important

Growing up in the late and post-Depression years, both Buddy and Elvis were “mama’s boys,” due to weak father figures. According to Amburn, “The situation would have far-reaching consequences for Buddy, who would make the mistake of relying on stronger personalities who were not always trustworthy.” Elvis had the same weakness, but fortunately for him the man in whom he put his trust, Colonel Parker, brought Elvis incredible fame and wealth, while Buddy’s manager held him back and stole a fortune from him.

An advantage that the young Buddy had that Elvis lacked was a trusted sibling. The youngest of four children, Buddy found in his eldest brother, Larry, a confidant he would cling to for the rest of his life.

When his other brother, Travis, came home from the war in 1945, he taught Buddy how play the guitar. Around the same time, about 900 miles to the east, Elvis Presley received a guitar for his eleventh birthday and began learning how to play it with help from his uncle and church pastor. A natural affinity for the instrument allowed Buddy’s guitar playing to progress at a rate that amazed his family.

Hank Williams, Sr., was Buddy’s first musical idol. According to Amburn, though, when Buddy first heard Fats Domino sing on the radio, he saw his future. “It was as if the heavens had opened,” Amburn explained. “But it was more than just the music. From that moment on, Buddy identified closely with blacks.” Meanwhile, an adolescent Elvis was experiencing a similar epiphany in Memphis, to where his family had moved in 1948.

Although a year younger, Buddy Holly got started in professional music before Elvis. Around 1951, when Buddy was 15 years old, he started jamming with another Lubbock musician, Jack Neal. The two put together a country and western act and played live entertainment Saturday morning for youngsters at Lubbock movie theaters. In September 1953, “The Buddy and Jack Show” made its debut on KDAV radio. On November 10 that year, a station DJ recorded an acetate of the duo singing and playing. It was just a few months after Elvis had walked into Sam Phillips’s Memphis Recording Service to make an acetate of “My Happiness” and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin.”

• Buddy the tortoise, Elvis the hare

As rock ’n’ roll became more prominent on the radio during Buddy’s senior year in high school, he and Jack began playing the new music at sock hops, store openings, and community shows. Meanwhile, things were happening much faster for Elvis in Memphis. By the time Buddy graduated from high school in 1955, Elvis already had four singles out on Sun Records and had worked the concert circuit across the south for a year and a half.

Everything changed for Buddy when Elvis came to Lubbock five different times in 1955. “What is certain beyond any doubt,” Amburn declared, “is that when Elvis Presley hit Lubbock in 1955, he transformed all the C&W pickers in Buddy’s circle into rockers. ‘Without Elvis,’ Buddy once said, ‘none of us could have made it.’ Though rock ’n’ roll had burst on the world of West Texas the previous year with Bill Haley’s ‘Shake, Rattle, and Roll,’ it was Elvis who whispered freedom into the ears of embattled Baptist boys like Buddy and unleashed a new generation of rockabillies.”

“Elvis changed Buddy,” singer Waylon Jennings, then another young West Texas musician, later told Elvis biographer Peter Guralnick. “It was the beginning of kids really starting to think for themselves, figuring things out, realizing things that they would never even have thought of before.”

Buddy’s brother Larry remembers when Elvis was late for one of his early 1955 appearances at Lubbock’s Fair Park Coliseum. “In Elvis’ absence, Buddy and his front band blew the roof off the coliseum, playing until Elvis came on,” Amburn reported. “Many people in the audience preferred Buddy to Elvis, Larry proudly recalled, although Buddy was still a beginner.”

On October 15, 1955, Elvis appeared at two venues in Lubbock. After finishing up at the coliseum, he gave another show at the Cotton Club, the city’s major dance hall. “We opened for Elvis,” recalled Sonny Curtis. “Bales of cotton were stacked around the stage to protect him from the audience. The most beautiful girls in Lubbock were trying to climb the bales to get at him. That’s what impressed us as much as his music. We’d been hillbillies but after the Cotton Club we were rockers like Elvis.”

• Buddy Holly knew Elvis “quite well”

The extent of Buddy’s personal relationship with Elvis in 1955 is unclear. “Buddy and Elvis got along pretty good,” Larry claimed. “When Elvis came to town, Buddy found him a girl. She was not anyone you’d find on this side of town.” As for Buddy, during his Australian tour in 1958, he told a DJ that he’d once known Elvis “quite well.”

Back in Lubbock in 1955, though, Elvis was clearly Buddy Holly’s idol. Buddy even made a leather guitar case for his J-45 that matched the one Elvis used to carry his Martin D-28. “I Forgot to Remember to Forget,” Elvis’s Sun record that topped Billboard’s C&W chart in late 1955, was Buddy’s favorite Presley song. Late in the year, Buddy and his band performed on "The Big D Jamboree," Dallas’s Saturday night country and western radio show. Sid King, another musician on the show that night, described Buddy as “virtually a carbon copy of Elvis.”

According to Amburn, in 1955 there was another Lubbock visitor who would play an important role in the careers of both Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly. Colonel Tom Parker came to town looking for a talent to manage. Amburn says that both Elvis and Buddy “intrigued” the Colonel, who decided to focus on Elvis. He thought enough of Buddy, though, to recommend him to Nashville talent agent Eddie Crandall.

That led to Buddy’s first big break in show business. When he and his band opened for Bill Haley and the Comets at Fair Park Coliseum in October 1955, Crandall was there to see Buddy. On December 2, Buddy signed an exclusive management contract with Crandall. That was less than two weeks after Elvis left Sun Records and signed a contract to record for RCA. Soon Crandall got Buddy a record deal with Decca.

As 1956 dawned, it looked like both singers’s dreams of fame and fortune were about to come true. Both Elvis and Buddy had January dates in Nashville for their first recording sessions for their new labels. While 1956 would turn out to be a spectacular breakout year for Elvis, for Buddy it was a year of failure and exploitation that would test his resolve to make it as a professional entertainer. In RCA’s Nashville studio on January 10, Elvis recorded “Heartbreak Hotel,” which would reach the top of Billboard’s pop chart in May, launching Presley’s fabulous run through the end of the decade. Meanwhile, Buddy’s Nashville Decca session on January 26 was a disaster that led to nowhere.

• Decca a little bit country, RCA a little bit rock ’n’ roll

Amburn explained how differing philosophies at RCA and Decca dictated totally different outcomes for the two young singers. “In the growing conflict between C&W and rock ’n’ roll … country music would be split down the middle, RCA and at least half of the C&W establishment fleeing to rockabilly … and the other half remaining straight country singers.” Some at RCA may have had their doubts, but they allowed Presley to do his thing. “At Decca,” noted Amburn, “Buddy’s mentors would prove less amenable to the new music; in fact, they hated rock ’n’ roll.”

The result was that instead of viewing Buddy as a potential new rockabilly star, Decca tried to force him into the existing country music model. The result was predictable. After Buddy’s first single, “Blue Days, Black Nights” and “Love Me” was released on April 16, it sold only 19,000 copies. “It’s a wonder the world ever again heard of Buddy Holly,” Amburn noted. Buddy’s second release for Decca also failed miserably, and at year’s end the label declined to renew his contract. As 1957 dawned, Buddy was penniless, his career no further along than it had been 12 months before.

The one positive thing Buddy took from his failed year at Decca was some experience with songwriting. For his January 1956 Nashville session, the label asked Buddy to show up with four original songs. One of the songs Buddy wrote and recorded for Decca, “That’ll Be the Day,” came off poorly and was never released by the label.

In January 1957, without a manager, a band, or a recording contract, Buddy returned to Lubbock and considered quitting the music business. Deciding to give it one more try, he formed another band and drove ninety miles northwest of Lubbock to record at Norman Petty’s recording studio in Clovis, New Mexico. There, on February 24, 1957, Holly’s life changed when he recorded a rocking version of “That’ll Be the Day.”

Petty took the acetate to Nashville and got Buddy a one-record contract on the Brunswick label. Amburn called Brunswick, “a kind of trash-basket label in which Decca dumped its undesirables.” “That’ll Be the Day” by the Crickets, the name of Buddy’s new band, was released nationally on May 27, 1957. It spent 22 weeks on Billboard’s Top 100 pop chart, peaking at #3. It reached that same number on Cash Box magazine’s list of “Best Selling Singles.” Buddy Holly had finally hit the big time.

• Buddy Holly's career took off in ’57

He had a lot of catching up to do, however. By the time “That’ll Be the Day” became Buddy’s first hit record, Elvis already had five #1 singles and eight gold records. Holly had two more of his own compositions lined up to follow his first hit—“Peggy Sue” and “Oh Boy,” both recorded at Clovis in July 1957. Both charted in the top 10 late in the year.

Suddenly, Buddy Holly was in great demand. With the Crickets, he appeared three times on American Bandstand and twice on The Ed Sullivan Show. At Christmas time in 1957 Buddy co-starred with Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, and the Everly Brothers on Holiday of Stars Twelve Days of Christmas Show in Times Square. As the new year began, Buddy Holly found himself Decca’s top recording artist.

Like Elvis had in 1956, Buddy Holly spent much of 1957 and 1958 on the road. Unlike Elvis, though, who headlined his own tours, tightly controlled by Colonel Parker, Buddy’s only option was to join the great rock ’n’ roll package tours, organized by promoters like Alan Freed and Dick Clark. “Planned and mounted like military campaigns, these all-star caravans swept across the country in buses,” Amburn explained, “playing as many as 70 cities in 80 nights.” Buddy toured the nation and Canada with other rock stars, such as Frankie Lymon, Gene Vincent, Paul Anka, Jerry Lee Lewis, Eddie Cochran, The Everly Brothers, Connie Francis, The Drifters, Chuck Berry, Buddy Knox, and Danny and the Juniors.

Although Buddy never met Elvis again after their 1955 encounters in Lubbock, their paths almost crossed again in Vancouver, B.C., in the fall of 1957, when both were out on tour. Elvis was there on August 31 for his controversial show at Empire Stadium. Buddy came through eight weeks later with a package tour booked into the Georgia Auditorium. Hall of Fame DJ Red Robinson interviewed both stars prior to their shows. Buddy expressed a longing for a break in the grueling rock ’n’ roll grind. “Enervated from singing his guts out in nightly rock shows,” Amburn explained, “he longed for a radical change in musical trends, confessing that he’d rather sing songs that didn’t require him to scream and shout.”

Elvis and Buddy both recorded their rock ’n’ roll versions of some R&B classics, including “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” “Ready Teddy,” “Shake, Rattle, and Roll,” and “Rip It Up.” Although Elvis never recorded a Buddy Holly song, Buddy recorded one of Elvis's from the soundtrack of his 1957 film, Jailhouse Rock. According to Waylon Jennings, Buddy’s version of “(You’re So Square) I Don’t Care” is the best example of the “Buddy Holly sound.”

The package tour format allowed Buddy to perform overseas, something Elvis often expressed a desire to do but never did. In January 1958, Buddy, along with Anka and Jerry Lee, flew out of New York for a tour in Australia. They stopped in Hawaii along the way, where Buddy performed a free show for military personnel at Schofield Barracks, the same venue where two months earlier Elvis had given his final concert of the 1950s. While in Australia, a DJ asked Buddy if Elvis was his favorite singer. “I guess he’s one of them,” Buddy responded. Soon after returning from Australia, Buddy and the Crickets left for England, arriving on March 1, 1958, for a twenty-five-day British tour.

• Rock ’n’ roll’s first wave played itself out

While Buddy was still in abroad, cracks were beginning to appear in his career and in rock ’n’ roll music in general. Buddy’s record sales began to decline. His single releases of “Maybe Baby” and “Rave On,” both considered early rock classics today, stalled at #18 and #37 respectively on the Top 100. “It’s So Easy,” another Holly classic, didn’t chart at all in 1958. Neither of Buddy’s albums reached the Top 40 on Billboard’s album chart. When Alan Freed’s forty-four-day “Big Beat” package tour, which included Buddy, ended with a riot in Boston, it galvanized the societal enemies of rock ’n’ roll to mount an all out war against it. Elvis was taken away by the army, and Jerry Lee Lewis’s career never recovered after it was revealed he had married his 14-year-old cousin.

The only good news for Buddy Holly in the latter half of 1958 was his marriage to Maria Elena Santiago in August. That fall, however, Buddy and his wife left Lubbock and moved to New York City. Buddy had fired his manager, but it was too late. Much of the money he had earned through record royalties and touring was gone, spent or tied up by the man Buddy had trusted to handle his financial affairs. (Reading Ellis Amburn’s account of how Norman Petty mismanaged Buddy Holly’s career should make all Elvis fans say, “Thank God for Colonel Parker.”)

In early 1959, Buddy Holly, with a pregnant wife and living off the generosity of his wife’s aunt, did something he didn’t want to do—he signed on for still another all-star package tour. The “Winter Dance Party” was to be a twenty-four-day meander across the upper mid-West in a converted school bus in the dead of winter. His death at age 22 in an Iowa cornfield plane crash on February 3, 1959, abruptly ended the brief yet brilliant career of Buddy Holly.

According to Peter Guralnick and Ernst Jorgensen in their book, Elvis: Day by Day, Elvis learned of Holly’s death at his army posting in Germany on February 5. The authors state that Colonel Parker’s assistant, Tom Diskin, sent a telegram of condolences to Holly’s family on Elvis’s behalf.

• Death brought fame to Buddy Holly

Recognition as one of rock ’n’ roll’s pioneers, denied him in life, came to Buddy in many forms in death. In addition to being charter members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, both Holly’s and Presley’s images appeared on U.S. Postal stamps in 1993. Buddy had five entries—“That’ll Be the Day,” “Not Fade Away,” “Rave On,” “Peggy Sue,” and “Everyday”—on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. (Elvis had 11 on the list.) “That’ll Be the Day” and “Peggy Sue” are on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s list of songs that shaped rock ’n’ roll.

No Graceland exists for Buddy Holly pilgrims. His birthplace in Lubbock was demolished years ago, and in the 1990s, his family sold off their Buddy Holly keepsakes and memorabilia. In Lubbock there is the Buddy Holly Center, inside of which is The Buddy Holly Gallery, a permanent display featuring, according to the center’s web site, “Artifacts owned by the City of Lubbock, as well as other items that are on loan.” Included in the display are “Buddy Holly’s Fender Stratocaster, a songbook used by Holly and the Crickets, clothing, photographs, recording contracts, tour itineraries, Holly’s glasses, homework assignments, and report cards.”

Like Elvis’s fans, the Buddy Holly faithful honor their rock idol by gathering each year on the anniversary of his death. Starting in February 1979, on the twentieth anniversary of his death, the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, where Buddy gave his final show on February 2, 1959, has hosted an annual Buddy Holly tribute weekend. The 2013 event is being expanded to four days to accommodate the ever-increasing number of rock ’n’ roll fans who attend. It’s not quite the same as the candle-light vigil at Graceland during Elvis Week, but those who are moved to do so can trek through the snow to a nearby cornfield where a marker memorializes the lonely spot where “the music died” back in 1959. | Alan Hanson (October 2012)

By Alan Hanson - The Elvis History Blog

Holly is considered the single most influential creative force in early rock and roll. His works and innovations were copied by his contemporaries and later musicians, notably The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, and Buddy exerted a profound influence on popular music. On April 15, 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Holly #13 on their list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.

Also on the private charter with Holly were the Big Bopper and Richie Valens. Holly's death was immortalized by the song The Day the Music Died.

I was a huge Buddy Holly fan while growing up in Iowa. One time I played Oh Boy, a Buddy Holly hit, 43 straight times on a jukebox to honor his death much to the chagrin of the country club members in the club Canteen who didn't like country music.



Buddy Holly belongs to the ages but his music belongs to us.

Buddy Holly True Love Ways

Peggy Sue

Buddy Holly – The Last Day

Don McLean – American Pie – The Day the Music Died

What you do not learn about me in a resume - My Personal Background and Experience - Jim Putnam

 

This is posted since traditional sites do not allow sufficient room to explain whom I am and what I have achieved.  Here is my real story.

20276 Park Place, PO Box 21 - Coltons Point, MD 20626

Phone 301-769-2027 - email: ivyonoak@yahoo.com

Ivy Hollow Productions

"An unusual collection of like-minded souls with considerable interest in the most ordinary and peculiar of things."

Jim Putnam, Proprietor

Did you ever wonder what it would be like to be friends with Yogi Berra?

How about having lunch with La Casa Nostra Godfather Joseph Bonanno?

Or sit on a remote New Jersey deck and chat with Brooke Shields?

Perhaps tour a museum with Wernher Von Braun, architect of our space program?

Or maybe enjoy dinner backstage with singer Celine Dion?

What about helping Bobby Kennedy's son Joseph II with his foundation?

Spend a day with the original Rasta Man Bob Marley?

Chat in a locker room with Smokin' Joe Frazier, world heavyweight boxing champion?

Be a sponsor of Richard Petty, top NASCAR driver in history?

Discover Hitler's secret SS film archives in the frontier outside Moscow?

What do these things all have in common?  Jim Putnam did them.

The Early Years

Some people just do not belong here.  Take Jim Putnam, an Iowa Hayseed for example.  He established a philosophy on life early, very early, and people often found it unsettling.

His self-described mission was "to disturb all settled ideas."  His approach to life was; "no definitions, no regulations, no laws and no prejudice."  True to his love for Lewis Carroll and his magnificent Alice in Wonderland, in Putnam's world "nothing was as it seemed."

Putnam lived to experience life, every aspect of life from the life force in all objects to the thrill of victory and annoyance of defeat.  Every day offered new capers and every experience a new chapter in his "Commonplace" book on life.  In his mind being open to anything and everything was a gateway to more adventures and he instinctively knew the more he learned the less he realized he knew.

Yet what chance did he ever have to be normal? A female physician (a rare occurrence) delivered him one year after two Atomic bombs ended World War II and then at six months old a firefighter saved him from a burning apartment.  At one and one-half years, he suffered a concussion and broke his face flying down a concrete stairway in a stroller.  At three, he was on IVs in a hospital with the mumps.

Four found him immersed in ice to break a 106° temperature.  By five, he was up to his chest sinking in quicksand in Texas.  There was a shootout at six when he and his brother Bob threw a box of bullets into an incinerator catching them in crossfire, followed by drowning at age seven, in a pond at summer camp, when everyone ignored his calls for help and he sank under three times.

By eight lightning hit him in a lake.  At nine, in his basement when pretending to be a priest and holding Mass and Communion it was electrocution.  A blizzard trapped him overnight in a cave with below zero temperatures at ten.  Next, when eleven, he fell through the ice on a lake in frigid weather and his clothes froze while trying to get home in the woods.

A speedboat collision in a ferocious Lake Michigan gale at age twelve split a second boat in two.  Then at thirteen he had a brain concussion in a football game, without equipment of course, had total amnesia and went into a deep coma for days.  All of this and he had not even started high school yet.

The mystical and magical Hopi Indians describe Jim Putnam as a "One Heart" who "walks between worlds."  In his world, Putnam always said some people pray for miracles, he relied on them.  When taking aptitude tests, Putnam used to drive the nuns crazy insisting he wanted to learn and experience everything, not be pigeonholed into a career path.  While in religion class his persistent questioning of dogma and theology kept him in constant trouble.

Born and raised in Iowa City, Iowa then moving to Ottumwa when he was eight, one might say he was a multi-tasking over-achiever from his earliest years.  In Kindergarten, he was already winning book-reading contests at the Iowa City Library.  He chose Greek Philosophers like Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle over the Hardy Boys mysteries, Popular Science and Popular Mechanics over teen magazines.

Oddly, by First grade he was leaving weekly instruction notes to his mother informing her of school and Church activities of the kids and reminding her about her duties that week for PTA, lunches, church receptions, and lunch needs for the gang.  He prepared his own meals by Third grade, and did his own laundry and ironed his own clothes by Fifth grade.  Before finishing Fifth grade, he read every textbook to be read through the Eighth grade.

Just before Third grade, his family moved from the youthful and vibrant Iowa City college town to Ottumwa, a struggling manufacturing town still trying to recover from coal mining origins.  His first memory of the town was waking up in a funeral home where his dad stayed while looking for a house.

Putnam's first memory of his new school, St. Mary's, was when the class had to have eye exams and he could not see a single line on the eye chart.  The nurse became furious with him saying he was lying and reduced the new kid in school to tears in front of his new classmates.

The sad truth was he was almost blind and no one had noticed, and the nurse refused to believe it was possible, so Jim Putnam showed up in his new town and new school wearing coke bottle glasses the lens were so thick.  From a cute little kid in a college town he became a freak in a foreign wilderness, while the funeral home and eyeglass disasters were an indication there was something foreboding about this place.

Putnam kids

In fact, so upside down was life in his new home that once his mother, in response to criticism of her son by his teacher, wrote she "also found Jim strange and he often seemed to live in another world."  Indeed, he did and his other world full of non-stop activity and endless adventures kept him sane until he could make his great escape after high school.

An exceptional Knight of the Alter (Alter Boy) he memorized every Mass in Latin.  In sports he was a YMCA swim team member and basketball all star, also on the Country Club swim team, won state championships in Little League and Babe Ruth baseball and was named Most Valuable player in one state championship.  His high school golf team played in four straight state championships.

When the Catholic high school for girls burned down just before Jim started high school, and the girls and boys shared school, his class was first to finish four years co-ed.  Ironically, every elementary and secondary school he attended in Iowa City and Ottumwa has been closed and torn down. 

During high school, he earned fourteen varsity letters in five sports excelling in baseball and golf, helped shatter records in basketball including a sweet sixteen berth in the state basketball tourney though being from the smallest school in the tourney, and finished ranked number one in the state in their class.  In fact, during his four years in high school, the varsity record was 84-11 and his team never lost a home game, thirty-four straight games.

By the time he graduated, he participated on numerous debate and speech clubs, was elected to several school offices, and played in the high school band.  A writer for the Unitas school newspaper and co-editor of the yearbook, Putnam also had several articles published in the Des Moines Register newspaper and won the Outstanding Journalism award.

Putnam brothers with Coach Kramer

The Siren Call of Music and Muses

In high school, Putnam had a promising rock and roll band but gave it up to play basketball and baseball for the University of Arizona Wildcats.  Interwoven throughout his life is music, perhaps because he is a third generation musician from Iowa City.

His grandfather, Wayne S. Putnam, had founded The Wayne Putnam Swing Orchestra, a featured band on the Moose Club circuit back in the 1930’s and ‘40’s.  His father, Wayne E. and Uncle Chuck both played in the orchestra and his grandmother taught piano in Iowa City.

Music was not limited to his father’s side of the family as his other Grandfather, Patrick Campbell, also of Iowa City, used to drag his young grandson with him in summers to his motel on the outskirts of Springfield, Missouri, the home of country music in the 1940’s and early ‘50’s.

One of many Campbell clan castles in Scotland

There young Jim spent many long nights listening to the country stars jamming in the motel coffee shop after gigs on the Smilin’ Jack Tyree Radio Show, or Korn’s A-Krackin barn dance, which later became the Ozark Jubilee in Springfield.  Who showed up at the coffee shop in the wee hours of the night?  It might be Porter Wagoner, Speedy Haworth, Chet Atkins, Eddy Arnold, and the list goes on.

It was the beginning of a lifelong interest in country music and the relationship between Celtic and country music tying together his ancestral roots from Scotland and Ireland.  Often as a kid, he would watch the University of Iowa Scottish Highlander bagpipe band at practices.

Even when he went to Arizona to play basketball and baseball he often attended local performances of his freshman classmate, an aspiring young singer named Linda Ronstadt.  At the same time members of his Beta Theta Pi fraternity were featured performers on the nationally broadcast Hootenanny Show and the NBC Today Show.  Among the many entertainers who performed at their fraternity house was the national hit group the Kingsmen of Louie, Louie fame.

He loved concerts in the dawning of the rock and roll age and got to meet a host of stars like Elvis, Sony and Cher, the Mamas and Papas, Moody Blues, and later got to work with many more like the Turtles, Blood Sweat and Tears, Frankie Avalon, and Frankie Valle and the Four Seasons on benefit projects.

Jim's first car in high school 1946 English Austin

Right after he graduated from high school, he traveled to New Haven, CT to meet with coaches at Yale University to decide if he would attend that fall.  After spending two years completing the interview process to get into Yale, he opted for Arizona.  Ironically, had he gone to Yale his classmates would have been Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton and George Bush, Jr., all Yale graduates from the same class as Jim. 

During the same trip, he spent a couple of weeks in NYC and DC.  While in NYC, he met Tiny Tim in The Page Three club in Greenwich Village, unbeknownst to Jim the most notorious lesbian bar in NYC.  He also was at the Blue Note and The Gaslight Cafe, hangout of Bob Dylan.

He made the best of NYC on his trip going to several Yankees games in the Bronx where he was in the dugout meeting players like Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Yogi Berra, and Whitey Ford.  There were also Mets games in their new Shea Stadium, the World's Fair in Queens, Coney Island in Brooklyn, and he attended nearly a dozen Broadway plays in Manhattan. 

At one point, he went to the world famous Brill Building located at 1619 Broadway just north of Time's Square and uptown from NYC's famous Tin Pan Alley neighborhood.  He met loosely affiliated groups of songwriter-producer teams working there including Carole King, Burt Bacharach, Neil Sedaka, Neil Diamond and Boyce and Hart, writers who dominated the rock and roll charts whose songs were recorded by Bobby Darin, Aretha Franklin, The Supremes, Ray Charles, Dusty Springfield, Paul Simon, and Elvis Presley, also in the Brill studios.

Later in his career Putnam returned to the Brill Building to use the Broadway Video studios 0f Loren Michael, creator of Saturday Night Live, to produce an award winning television special.  He and Chuck Hammer, legendary lead guitarist with Lou Reed and David Bowie, often were partners in projects. Eventually Putnam Putnam would help found a company housed at 52nd and 5th Avenue, overlooking St. Patrick's Cathedral and NBC Rockefeller Center, just blocks from the Brill Building.

June 1964 Putnam visited the construction site of the Twin Towers, soon to be the tallest buildings in the world, at a new complex called the World Trade Center.  It would open in 1970.  In the 1980's when Putnam worked for the Governor of New Jersey, on occasion he attended board meetings for the Governor at the Port Authority in the Twin Towers, the government agency that owned the World Trade Center complex.

February 26, 1993, while working in Manhattan he was on his way to a meeting in the North Tower of the World Trade Center the day a terrorist bomb exploded killing six and injuring over 1,000.  September 11, 2001 Putnam, still working in Manhattan, was having coffee on the front porch of his home in Jersey across the Bay from lower Manhattan, when he saw the second airplane crash into the Twin Towers and the subsequent collapse of the buildings in the worst terrorist attack in our history.  In time, Putnam would live and work in New Jersey and Manhattan longer than he lived in Iowa in his youth.

Back to music, there was another occasion when he spent an entire day with Bob Marley on a plane trying to get through snowstorms into Minneapolis, Minnesota, and finally giving Marley his winter coat because the soft-spoken Jamaican did not own one.

Putnam integrated music into almost everything he did from concerts in political campaigns, to rock groups in public affairs programs, to Nashville recording sessions.  He often used friends from Mannheim Steamroller in Omaha to perform at political events and play at studio sessions.

Once Putnam was managing a very close Congressional campaign and needed minority votes to win.  He contacted the legendary BB King's manager to get BB to give a boost to the campaign efforts.  By arrangement, Jim and the candidate greeted BB at his plane at the airport and escorted him to the waiting press inside the terminal.

When he pulled off his jacket, BB wore the candidate's tee shirt and he mentioned his "old friend" to the waiting press.  The stunned media, suspecting the candidate knew nothing about BB King, asked him his favorite King record, and the candidate replied, "Gotta Pay the Cost to be Boss."

In return, BB requested a box of the best Omaha steaks for him and his band after the concert and a small grill to cook them.  Shortly after Putnam departed the room of BB and company fire alarms woke the hotel guests when a wind change blew the smoke from the grill on a balcony just outside the room, back into the hotel.

The Political Years

After attending the University of Arizona on a sports scholarship and majoring in journalism, he attended Parsons College, now Maharishi University of Management founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a Vedic sage who was mentor to the Beatles at the height of their career.  Jim also went to the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and by age 22 he began his career in politics working for the first of three mayors of Omaha, Nebraska, a Republican, followed by a Democrat, then another Republican who became a Democrat.

During the next four years, Putnam would undertake a series of pilot projects that would change the way local and federal governments functioned well into the future.  He was the second employee hired to create the first Regional Council of Governments in the Midwest to identify and implement government consolidations, mergers, shared services, and coordinated planning in order to improve service and lower costs.  The success was immediate as Albuquerque, Indianapolis, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and Toronto launched additional pilot programs.  Jim was on several task forces for the National League of Cities and US Conference of Mayors.

The US Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics honored Putnam for being first statistician in the nation to create a methodology to identify pockets of high unemployment and poverty areas within metropolitan areas, data that became the foundation for economic and work force training programs throughout the country.

Working with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in the Executive Office of the President, he created the nation's first Comprehensive Manpower Program consolidating 18 jobs, employment and training programs in five federal departments into a single entity lowering administrative costs up to 80% and reallocating nearly 50% into improved services.  As a result, the federal government implemented it nationwide saving tens of millions of dollars a year.

Then he helped consolidate both financial and management-reporting systems so local government could use one report for all federal agencies.  The Omaha Riverfront Development Program he helped create with the Mayor was a national pilot development program.  At one point, a temporary assignment to assist the director of the federal Office of Economic Opportunity allowed Putnam to save federal funding for the popular Headstart and Legal Services programs for low income.

Putnam published award-winning studies such as a massive work titled The Invisible Americans identifying poverty in America, did analysis to identify America's unemployed, and was part of the Census Bureau Address Coding Task Force to see that all government data was available on a block by block basis.

He served on task forces to evaluate the Federal Bureau of Prisons, reform the welfare system, create federal block grants to cities and states, design and implement the historic General Revenue Sharing program for states and cities, and helped draft new education, energy, environmental, housing, and Justice Department law enforcement assistance programs to assist local governments.

After four years, he was in our nation's capitol as a domestic affairs specialist for the Executive Office of President Richard Nixon, reporting to Roy Ash, OMB Director and founder of Litton Industries, and Frank Zarb, Associate Director of OMB and later Chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange.

Putnam was one of 32 specialists of the little known White House New Federalism Task Force that restructured the entire federal domestic government from agencies to programs to policy.  The New York Times called the mysterious Presidential task force the most powerful federal domestic initiative by a president since the New Deal under President Franklin Roosevelt.

Silently it went about the work of decentralizing the federal government and transferring powers to our nation's governors during the darkest hours of the American presidency, the year between the Watergate and Impeachment hearings.

Over the next decade, he became a reporter for the Omaha World Herald, spent four terms working for the US Congress, managed two successful congressional campaigns, and helped elect the first Jewish US Senator from Nebraska.

Presidential campaign experience included work for John and later Bobby Kennedy, and Presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush, Sr., followed by work with Ross Perot on presidential and NAFTA efforts. His political experience included all aspects of the legislative and executive branches of local, state, and federal governments and involved working for Democrats, Republicans, and Independents.

Nationally, he served as Deputy Arrangements Chairman for the 1972 Republican National Convention and the largest presidential election victory in history resulted (Nixon won 49 of 50 states).  Putnam served as campaign manager for US House and Senate races and culminated his political career by hosting separate events with all four living GOP presidents (Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush 1) the same year.

While in politics Putnam also worked with Governor Charles Thone of Nebraska and spent eight years with Governor Thomas Kean in New Jersey (recently Chairman of the 9/11 Terrorism Commission), serving the latter as a chief of staff, media and communications director and assistant state treasurer of New Jersey.

In 1981 Kean, a moderate Republican won the governor's race by the closest margin in New Jersey history, just 1,797 votes of 2.4 million cast.  By 1985 Kean won by the largest victory margin in history, getting 69.5% of the vote in a Democrat state and winning by 794,229 votes.  Putnam was active in the 1985 campaign, the most successful "voter inclusion program" ever undertaken by a GOP candidate in the nation.  Kean's record margin included over 60% of the Black, Labor Union, and Roman Catholic votes.

Jim worked with former Kean chief of staff and campaign manager Greg Stevens and cabinet member Leonard Coleman, who became President of the National League in Major League Baseball, on the 1985 campaign.  He helped coordinate with Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King, Jr., who endorsed Kean, and Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa.  In January 1986, a song Putnam wrote at the request of Coretta Scott King called I Had A Dream performed at the first national holiday celebrations honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. in Atlanta and San Francisco.

Working for Governor Kean he successfully led the state effort to sue oil companies and won over $600 million for the state.  He was a member of the State Planning Commission, the Farmland Preservation Commission, the State Energy Planning Commission, and State Recycling program, all nationally recognized initiatives of excellence in government.  As chief of staff he also oversaw the New Jersey Motion Picture and Television Commission headed by actress Celeste Holm as well as state involvement in PBS stations in New Jersey and NYC.

The Kean years also found Jim becoming acquaintances with New York Giants legendary coach Bill Parcells and assistant coach Bill Belichick (now coach of the New England Patriots) through the New Jersey Sports Authority, owner of Giants Stadium, when Putnam represented the Governor or Commissioner Coleman at meetings.  The Giants won two Super Bowls during those years.  Jim also became friends with New York Yankees All Stars Yogi Berra and Phil Rizzuto during various political activities.

Passions and Pursuits - More Music, Writing, and Entertainment

While working for the Governor he created and produced a television special for the Arts and Entertainment TV Network on energy conservation which won the Cable TV ACE award, the Award for Cable Excellence, the national cable network Emmy, as best public service program in America.  The program featured actress and singer Patti Lapone, Tony-winning star of the Broadway play Evita, and the band he created called State Property, the first government funded show ever broadcast on the Arts and Entertainment network and first to win the coveted ACE award.

During this time, he was a creator, partner, and collaborator with multiple Emmy winner Andrew Carl Wilk, now Executive Producer for television at the Lincoln Center for the the Performing Arts in NYC.  The credits include The Energy Show for Arts and Entertainment Network, Flashpoint - a PBS weekly public affairs program, and the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra of NYC whose annual Salute to Broadway at the Paper Mill Playhouse, the largest regional theatre in the nation, featured Tony winning actors performing the best songs on Broadway.

Putnam wrote several scripts for Jim Henson's Muppet Babies TV program directed by Wilk and worked with Andrew (conductor and director) in community and regional playhouse productions of Annie, Jesus Christ Superstar, Company and Pirates of Penzance. A number of rising stars on Broadway acted in these popular plays.

From politics, he moved to Madison Avenue where he reunited with former Reagan and Bush presidential campaign experts including Roger Ailes, media consultant and recent President of Fox News.  There were also pollsters Richard Wirthlin and Neil Newhouse, and media creative master Phil Dusenberry, Chairman of BBDO America advertising agency and creator of the Michael Jackson, Ray Charles, and Cindy Crawford Pepsi ad campaigns among many others.  Phil's Crawford ad is one of the top ten Super Bowl ads of all time.

The first person hired at Media, Inc. in NYC, Jim helped grow it to $300 million in billings in three years.  He worked with a number of rock stars on benefits like the annual Starlight Foundation gala, stars including Howard Kaylan, lead singer for the Turtles and Mothers of Invention, and David Clayton Thomas and the Gellis brothers of Blood Sweat and Tears.  He once had dinner backstage with Celine Dion and Michael Boulton after a New Jersey amphitheater performance.

While working in New York in 1994 he formed his own media company, Ivy Hollow Productions, where he produced the first digital recording of the New Testament of the Bible by renowned Shakespearian dramatic actor Max McLean.  Working with Bob Monroe and his Monroe Foundation Jim used "hemispherical synchronization" to increase reader retention when listening to the recording.

After publishing two books of poetry, he then wrote and published The Joshua Chronicles, an inspirational and mystical work of fiction.  At the same time, he began writing the words and music for a song catalog that now totals over 500 songs, and he formed two bands to record the music, Nashville Bound and the John Galt Band.  Over 15,000 Internet friends and fans have helped the bands achieve over a million Internet plays.

National Geographic Television, Ancient Cultures and Sacred Sites

His lifelong fascination with ancient cultures led him to sacred sites around the world, including many in Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, Mexico, Russia, and Canada.  It was a stimulus to become involved with Andrew Wilk again at the National Geographic Society television division as a creative consultant and in providing soundtracks and themes for a number of Nat Geo TV shows with the Pinnacle Group in Utah.  While at National Geographic Television, a series he helped create and post produce with Chuck Hammer, Really Wild Animals (CBS TV Network and Disney Network), earned one Emmy and five Emmy nominations.

Ivy Hollow undertook major national media campaigns for book publishers and record companies in Nashville and Washington, D.C.  Putnam also created and produced a nationally syndicated weekly radio program in Nashville, Family Values, introducing new Christian singers and authors and launching numerous singers to the top of the national charts including Point of Grace, Anointed, Jackie Velasquez, Rich Mullins and many others.

Dancing the Tightrope and Take Me Now God! are two books he wrote inspired by the experiences of his life and the many influences growing up. The first book traces the early childhood through teen years and the many adventures all kids shared while coming of age in the days before cell phones, texting, video games and personal computers. The latter is the end of the pursuit of the meaning of life, a rather hilarious journey through the baby boomer maze of metaphysical and spiritual paths to the truth.

His next literary work led him on trips throughout Great Britain and Ireland which preceded travel to Russia in search of secret Soviet film archives of Josef Stalin. In the frontier outside Moscow on a military base near Stalin's home, he discovered the extensive KGB cold war film archives of Stalin and the Nazi SS film archives of Adolph Hitler, which had vanished 50 years earlier in the fall of Berlin.  Over 32 million feet of film footage was kept in the top secret archives. Putnam was the first American the forty-nine archive staff had ever met and only the second to visit the archive in the 60+ years since it opened.

After seven years of research including access to previously "classified" files in America, England, France, and Russia, he wrote his subsequent book, Saviors of the 20th Century - Hitler and Stalin - the War of Annihilation between the Nazis and Communists.  It is a non-fiction narrative history tracing the roots and growth of Communism, Nazism, Hitler, and Stalin.

While in Russia, he was able to acquire and bring back to the western world a stunning video documentary that exposed horrid living conditions and death rates in Russian orphanages.  It led to major changes in the health and safety of abandoned children in Russia.

He also worked with international groups to help adopt Russian and Chinese children.  As a result, he made several appearances as a guest and host of Russia Today, a syndicated public education television program out pf Washington, DC.  In addition, Nazi footage acquired by Putnam through the Russian archives has appeared in Turner Broadcasting Productions.

Beamish - Neapolitan Mastiff

In 2000 he joined The Interpublic Group of Companies (IPG) in NYC, one of the world's largest media companies, after they bought Media, Inc., the media company which Putnam helped create in NYC in the mid-1990's.

Energy and Environment

Always intrigued by science, physics and inventions, he studied math and physics and received a license from the Atomic Energy Commission to handle radioactive materials fifteen years before being involved in the clean up of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident while working for the New Jersey governor.

He received awards from President Johnson for work with Keep America Beautiful and the National Association of Business, and was involved in several environmental pilot projects including industrial cogeneration, massive solid waste disposal incinerators, fusion energy (Princeton, NJ), and he oversaw implementation of the nation's first statewide mandatory recycling program in New Jersey.

A member of the task force to create the Federal Energy Agency in response to Arab oil embargoes, he advocated alternative energy before it was popular, even patented and manufactured a solar energy system in the mid 1970's.  The latter involved a consortium he recruited of blue chip corporations including PPG Industries, Phillips Petroleum, Goodyear Tire and Rubber and Dow Chemical.

CuChulainn Deo Irie - Irish Wolfhound

His fascination with science and nature prepared him for a most unusual exposure to natural disasters and the forces of nature.  For example, Jim had his homes hit by tornadoes in three different states, experienced hurricanes in Texas, Florida, and Maryland, floods in California, Missouri, and Iowa, and blizzards in Iowa and Nebraska.

As if that was not enough, he also experienced earthquakes in California and Maryland (he was less than 50 miles from the epicenter of a 6.2 quake that hit the east coast, the strongest one in over a century), and was caught in the Mad Cow disease outbreak in England.

Science and Intelligence Agencies

A close friend and confidant of Margaret (Maggie) Sanders, daughter of Colonel Harlan Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame, it was through Maggie and her affiliation with the National Academy of Sciences he interviewed numerous Nobel prize-winning scientists as well as metaphysical personalities Maggie knew from her life-long search for the Lost Continent of Atlantis.  Also through her Putnam was a participant in the MIT Media Lab - Society of the Mind with Professor Marvin Minsky, founder of artificial intelligence in Boston.

More recently, Putnam worked with Victor Sheymov, a key KGB cold war defector to the US and with James Woolsey, former CIA Director under President Clinton, to establish an international computer security company, Invicta Networks, and to help publish books on intelligence agency activities.

He also works with CBA Pharma, Inc., a Kentucky pharmaceutical company, with a promising potential treatment to cure cancer and drug resistant diseases.  CBA is the first firm to enter FDA Phase 3 human trials with a natural compound that results in the destruction of multi-drug resistant cells including cancer.

Of course, the implications go way beyond cancer since most drug resistance happens in areas of drug over-prescription and saturation over the years, such as treatment with antibodies, medications for depression, high blood pressure, etc.  Even diseases once thought wiped out are making comebacks because of their ability to mutate and most dangerous of all are the hospital-based drug resistant staff infections with their deadly consequences.

The Hopi Indians

Ever since his first visit to meet the Hopi Indians near the Grand Canyon in 1964 Jim has worked with indigenous spiritual leaders including the past three Hopi traditional spiritual leaders along with Navajo, Algonquin, Ute, Sioux, Australian Aborigine and many others to help preserve their cultures and their sacred ways.  His invitation to film the fulfillment of numerous sacred prophecies with the Hopi, Algonquin, Ute, and Dali Lama is a highlight of his fifty years working with Native Americans and Indigenous groups around the world.

On one of his many trips to Arizona, the National Park Service archeological office had invited him to bring a film crew and shoot footage of a little known, ancient Indian site with a twelve mile stretch of undisturbed ancient wall paintings just above the Grand Canyon, called Snake Gulch Canyon that could only be reached by horseback.

While driving to the site the evening before a coyote jumped in front of Putnam's van bringing it to a screeching halt, and then disappeared.  The next morning as they made their way to the sacred site on horseback Putnam's horse was startled by a snake, tossing him fifteen feet down a gulley where he cracked three ribs.  With no access to medical treatment, he finished over ten more hours on horses completing the shoot.  The Hopi told him the "trickster" coyote came to force Jim to take a long overdue rest.

Animal Rescues

Throughout his life he helped heal injured animals and birds his neighbors brought him.  His most memorable rescue took place recently in Southern Maryland one frigid winter day when he went into the bitter cold water up to his neck to save a drowning and sick Bald Eagle along the shore of the Potomac River.  He saved the Eagle, it went to rehabilitation, and later Putnam was able to release it back into nature.  As a volunteer of the Bald Eagle rescue center in Delaware he released another Eagle in Maryland as well.

  

From national politics to cyber security to potential pioneering medical breakthroughs, he still most enjoys music, writing, and trying to help people, animals, places, and things.  Among many current pursuits he is a songwriter through Steven Sharp, Sharp Objects Music Company of Nashville, and his bands, Nashville Bound and the John Galt Band are popular internet groups at Soundclick, MySpace, Indie Records, and many other internet sites.

Media and Entertainment - News Reporting, Books, Music, Television and Publishing

Publishing

He designed a national marketing campaign and produced an album of Christian artists to introduce The Promise, a new CEV Bible translation making it the first Bible to be #1 on national bestseller lists in modern times.

Putnam is publisher of the popular Internet based Coltons Point Times newspaper with over 1,700 articles and columns online featuring multiple investigative stories, and 144,000 monthly readers.  Popular articles include;

Conversations with Melchizedek

Lyme Disease - America's Next Pandemic

Our Broken Health Care System

Federal Campaign Reform

Politics and Political Parties

Histories Mysteries about Southern Maryland

GMO's - Truth and Myth

Cyber Security - Are we really safe?

The Rothschild Dynasty - a Trillionaires Delight

and, serialized excerpts from several Putnam books

You can view his newspaper at: http://coltonspointtimes.blogspot.com/

Mr. Henry - Bloodhound

Books Authored

Words I Chose Not To Speak (poetry)

Second Thoughts (poetry)

Dancing the Tightrope (book and television series)

The Joshua Chronicles (spiritual and supernatural fiction)

Take Me Now God!  (hilarious comedy and parody of Baby Boomers)

Arizona Daily Star Tucson

Saviors of the 20th Century - Hitler and Stalin - The War of Annihilation between the Nazis and Communists (non-fiction historical)

Left Handed, Four Eyed, Small Town, and Catholic, and they call me Lucky? (autobiographical)

Television Shows

Jim Henson's Muppet Babies, wrote several scripts for the TV series

Flashpoint, created and produced a PBS weekly public service television program

The Energy Show, Arts and Entertainment national broadcast - winner of ACE - Award for Cable Excellence (cable TV Emmy) Executive in charge of production

Really Wild Animals, National Geographic TV series on CBS and Disney, 26 episodes, winner of one Emmy and nominated for 5 Emmys - Creative consultant for script and music and post production

Dancing the Tightrope TV Series in development - producer, writer and composer

Several Marilyn Monroe books and scripts under development.

Music

Bible Soundtrack - Max McLean and the Bible

Ivy Hollow Theme - co-wrote with Academy award songwriter Dennis Matkosky

Nashville Bound band - wrote 23 songs recorded by Nashville Bound in Nashville.

John Galt Band - wrote 150 songs for Dancing the Tightrope TV series soundtrack The Story of a Life

State Property band - executive in charge of production for Arts and Entertainment TV special and six music videos

Ivy Hollow music - wrote I Had a Dream performed at first Martin Luther King, Jr. national holiday celebrations in Atlanta, GA and San Francisco, CA

Currently additional 250+ songs in song catalog

Radio

Created and produced nationally syndicated weekly radio show from Nashville called Family Values introducing Christian singers and authors

Organizations

University of Arizona Alumni

Beta Theta Pi National fraternity

Omaha Press Club

White House New Federalism Task Force

MIT Society of the Mind

AEC (Atomic Energy Commission) Radioactive Users license

http://coltonspointtimes.blogspot.com/

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