I’m having my morning coffee before heading out for what will be a long day. I wanted to take a few brief moments however to note that Jim Croce and Maury Muehleisen died on this date fifty years ago today. Maury Muehleisen’s name may be less familiar to many, but it was his guitar work that made so much of Croce’s work come to life. Croce was thirty and Muehleisen all of twenty-four when the plane in which they were flying from Natchitoches, Louisiana to an upcoming show in Texas crashed. They and four others were all killed.

When Jim was in the Army National Guard there were banks of pay telephone booths on base from which at scheduled times enlisted men were allowed to call home. Croce never forgot the scenes he sometimes saw play out in which men who had received Dear John letters called their wives or girlfriends to learn as much as they could in the amount of time their ten cents allowed to learn why their sweethearts had left them. From those experiences came one of Jim Croce’s most poignant songs.