If you have a poster from Buddy Holly's stop in Duluth with the 1959 Winter Dance Party tour, Andrew Hawley would like to talk to you.
He'd really, really like to talk to you.
Hawley, a 42-year-old Los Angeles entrepreneur, took out an ad in the News Tribune classifieds seeking the rare poster -- and offering $20,000 for it.
"I just figured I'd put my money where my mouth is," Hawley said this week in a phone interview. "If I put enough of a bounty out there, someone who has [a poster] might at least call me out of intrigue.
"You've got to throw a big enough reward out there to get noticed," he said.
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And that's not all. Hawley said the poster doesn't need to have been hermetically sealed away from sunlight in archival storage for him to write out a check.
"I don't care if it has tack holes on it, tape, I don't care if it's missing a corner," Hawley said. "I'm probably the easiest person to sell to."
Hawley said he might be able to get a poster on eBay for about a fifth of the price and even called it "a silly piece of cardboard." But he's serious about getting his hands on one.
He said he's advertised for it in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the St. Cloud Times and the Hibbing Daily Tribune over the past three months. He also has a Web site, theposterbuyer.com, which lets potential customers know "phone calls accepted 24/7!"
"The real reward is actually tracking down the item, holding it in your hands and gazing at it," he said.
He's particularly interested in the 1959 Winter Dance Party tour because, for him, it's the distillation of a bygone era. The poster from the tour stop in Green Bay, for instance, stipulates that jean-wearers will not be allowed in and that no "intoxicating beverages" will be served.
The tour was a fateful one. Holly died in a plane crash three days after his Duluth performance. Also killed were singer Ritchie Valens and singer/disc jockey "The Big Bopper," J.P. Richardson.
"It really captures the time period," Hawley said.
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News of Hawley's offerdidn't astonish Shelly Crittendon, marketing and special events coordinator for the Buddy Holly Center museum in Lubbock, Texas, Holly's hometown.
"I don't think that would be an outrageous price," she said.
Kevin Schoneman operates the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, the venue for Holly's last performance, and has a poster from the Winter Dance Party Tour on display.
He said he has never heard of anyone making a serious offer on the poster. Schoneman said he heard only about 20 copies of the original poster were made and recalled that, in a conversation a few years ago among some of the tour stop's organizers, the value of an original was estimated at far lower than Hawley's offer.
"They never mentioned $20,000," Schoneman said. "I think it was more like $5,000."
The Surf Ballroom's gift shop sells reproduction of the poster for $5, and Schoneman said he often gets calls from fans asking him to appraise replicas they thought were originals.
Hawley, who has a collection of about 1,000 posters, has original posters from the Winter Dance Party tour stops in Green Bay, Wis., Mankato, Minn., and Fort Dodge, Iowa.
In his search for a poster from the Jan. 31 show at the Duluth Armory, he's gotten a few calls about his ad, but most are offering to sell him "everything but your kitchen sink." He hasn't gotten any leads on the poster.
