John Denver
Military
connection
Music
Moving on then to the next new name on our
list, we find that on December 31, 1943 – precisely forty-two years before the
plane crash that would claim the life of Ricky Nelson – Henry John
Deutschendorf, Jr., better known as John Denver, was born in Roswell, New
Mexico. A few years later, the town of
Roswell would make a name for itself
and become something of a tourist destination. But that is not really our focus
here today, though it should be noted that Henry John Deutschendorf, Sr. might
well have known a little something about that incident, given that he was a
career US Air Force officer assigned to the Roswell Army Air Field (later
renamed the Walker Air Force Base), which was likely the origin of the object
that famously crashed in Roswell.
After spending his childhood being frequently
uprooted, as did many of our cast of characters,
Denver attended
Texas
Tech
University in the
early 1960s. In 1964, he apparently heard the call of the Pied Piper and
promptly dropped out of school and headed for LA. Once there, he joined up with
the Chad Mitchell Trio, the group from which Jim McGuinn had recently departed
to co-found The Byrds. By November 1966,
Denver was
front-and-center at the so-called ‘Riot on the Sunset Strip,’ alongside folks
like Peter Fonda, Sal Mineo and a popular husband-and-wife duo known as Sonny
and Cher.