Ex-Band Mate Leads Campaign to Add Ritchie Valens to Walk of Fame

Gil Rocha wants Latino rocker Ritchie Valens’ popularity set in stone--literally.

Not just any stone, mind you. The only kind that will do is the black marble terrazzo that holds the coral stars of the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

But the secret group in charge of choosing the stars is a little less enamored of Valens than is Rocha, who played in the same band with Valens when Valens was a sophomore at San Fernando High School.

That panel passed over Valens this year, although its spokesman, Johnny Grant, says candidates are rarely selected the first year they are nominated.

Rocha, 52, is determined to get a spot for his hero on the 3 1/2-mile Walk of Fame because he is afraid time may be running out.

“Before the movie ‘La Bamba’ came out, I’d mention that I played vibraphones in the same band with Ritchie Valens and the kids would say, ‘Who?’ ” Rocha said. “I want to get Ritchie immortalized before people start forgetting about him again.”

Rocha, a Sylmar resident who in the 29 years since Valens’ death has fathered seven children and become a supervisor for a computer factory, formed a committee last year at the height of the “La Bamba” craze to get Valens a star.

Valens’ popularity, which reached its pinnacle in 1959 and then faded after his death at age 17 in a plane crash that winter, experienced a resurgence last summer when the movie was released.

The committee, composed of Valens’ fans, relatives and friends, raised the $3,500 necessary to pay for the star’s installation on the Walk of Fame by holding a dance at the American Legion Hall in San Fernando. On Oct. 19, 1957, Valens’ band, the Silhouettes, played at the same hall for $35, said Rocha, who kept the band’s original ledger book. That was before recording studio executives changed Valens’ last name from the longer Valenzuela.

The news that stars had been given to such relative unknowns as radio personality Carmen Dragon shocked Ernestine Reyes, 51, Valens’ aunt, a committee member. Valens, whose family was so poor they picked plums for money one summer, had lived with Reyes for a few months shortly before he died, she said.

“I felt like my heart had just been cut out,” Reyes said. “But there’s no way we’re giving up.”

The group recently mounted a letter-writing campaign in the hope that sackfuls of fan mail for Valens will sway the Walk of Fame board. Even state Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sepulveda) has written a letter.

Great as Valens’ success was, Katz wrote, “it becomes even greater when his economic and ethnic background are considered. In unveiling a Ritchie Valens star on the Walk of Fame, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce can accomplish two goals: It can honor a musician of unquestioned talent and accomplishment, and it can encourage poor and minority youths to aspire to greatness.”

But Grant, the Walk of Fame chairman, said the letters “won’t do them a bit of good.” The 12 panel members, whose identities are kept confidential to protect them from “being badgered,” don’t read fan letters, Grant said. The board has awarded 1,875 stars since 1960 in six categories: motion pictures, television, recording, live theater, radio and posthumous. This year, John Lennon and David Janssen, who starred in the TV show “The Fugitive,” were selected in the posthumous category.

Grant said the board received about 400 nominations this year for all six categories. He said nominees are judged by three criteria--professional achievement, longevity of five years or more and contributions to the community.

Rocha is sure Valens qualifies. His eyes fill with tears as he recounts visits to Valens’ grave site in Mission Hills, where fans from all over the country still leave love letters. He said band members did not resent Valens’ success and remained friends with the singer, unlike the relationship that was depicted in the movie. They even raised money to pay for his gravestone, he said.

“Ritchie was our hero, our hometown hero,” Rocha said. “I have no doubt that if he was still an entertainer, he would have been as big as Elvis.”