MIKE GRACIA

Waylon Arnold Jennings (June 15, 1937 – February 13, 2002)

Jennings was a country music singer, songwriter, and musician.
best known as one of the founding pioneers of the Outlaw
Movement in country music.

Jennings started to play guitar at age of eight and first performed
at age 12 on KVOW radio, after which he formed his first band, The
Texas Longhorns. Jennings left high school at age 16, determined
to become a musician and worked as a performer and DJ on KVOW, KDAV, KYTI, KLLL, in Coolidge, Arizona, and Phoenix.

In 1958, Buddy Holly arranged Jennings’s first recording session,
and hired him to play bass. Jennings gave up his seat on the ill-
fated flight in 1959 that crashed and killed Holly, J. P. “The Big
Bopper” Richardson and Ritchie Valens. Jennings died in his sleep
from complications of diabetes at the age of 64, at his home in Chandler,
 Arizona.

Waylon Jennings and Buddy Holly, taken in a Photo Booth
(1959).

Waylon  Jennings and Buddy Holly during the Winter Dance
Party Tour in 1959.

James (Jimmie) Frederick Rodgers
(September 18, 1933 – January 18, 2021)

LM DESERT, Calif. (AP) — Jimmie Rodgers, singer of the 1957
hits “Honeycomb” and “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine” whose
career in music and movies was disrupted by a severe head
injury a decade later, has died. His publicist Alan Eichler said
Rogers, who was born in Camas, Washington, died from kidney
disease on January 18 in Palm Desert, California. He had also
tested positive for COVID-19.

MIKE GRACIA

On August 1, 1966, after stabbing his mother and his wife to death
the night before, Charles Whitman,(above) a former Marine, took
rifles and other weapons to the observation deck atop the Main
Building tower at the University of Texas at Austin, then opened
fire indiscriminately on persons on the surrounding campus and
streets. Over the next 96 minutes he shot and killed 16 people
(including one unborn child) and injured 31 others; a final victim
died in 2001 from the lingering effects of his wounds. The incident
ended when a policeman and a civilian reached Whitman and shot
him dead. The attack was the deadliest mass shooting by a lone
gunman in U.S. history until it was surpassed 18 years later by the
San Ysidro McDonald’s massacre.

The University of Texas at Austin Tower, Austin, Texas.

Gladys Maria Knight was born in Atlanta, Georgia.

Singer, songwriter and actress Gladys Knight is a seven-time
Grammy Award-winner who is best known for the hits she
recorded during the 1960s and 1970s, for both the Motown
and Buddah Records labels, with  her group Gladys Knight
& the Pips, which included her brother Merald  "Bubba"
Knight and her cousins Edward Patten and William Guest.