Good morning. Today is the 34th day of the year. On this day in 1959, a small private plane carrying three rock and roll stars – Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the “Big Bopper” (J.P. Richardson) — crashed in a cornfield near Mason City, Iowa, killing all three. Years later, singer-songwriter Don McLean immortalized the crash as “the day the music died.”

 

Well-known people who were born today include comedian Shelley Berman, actress Morgan Fairchild (“Dallas,” “Falcon Crest”), Hall of Fame football player Bob Griese, actor Nathan Lane (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, The Producers) and Hall of Fame football player Fran Tarkenton.

 

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Tonight, the New York Foundation for the Arts’ Bootstrap Arts Festival kicks off with an opening night gala featuring works by 18 visual artists. The party will take place at the organization’s headquarters at 20 Jay St., Suite 740, Brooklyn.

 

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According to the Daily News, vandals targeted Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church in Williamsburg, breaking a statue of St. Jude, writing an obscenity on a Bible and defacing a statue of the Virgin Mary, cops said. The vandals also wrote the letter “V” on the foreheads of both statues. Staffers at the church on North Eighth Street discovered the damage yesterday morning and called police.

 

A 47-year-old man was fighting for his life yesterday after being slammed into by a silver Nissan that barreled through a red light near 50th Street in Sunset Park on Wednesday night, the Daily News reports. According to witnesses, the driver ignored the pleas of passers-by to stop. The car was later found abandoned with damage to its bumper and windshield in nearby Borough Park.

 

According to Sheepshead Bites, there are only 215 days left for smokers to enjoy a cigarette on the Kingsborough Community College campus. The City University of New York has chosen to ban smoking in all its colleges, both indoors and outdoors. It also prohibits tobacco-industry marketing and promotions within the various CUNY campuses.

 

A Brooklyn man has been named the winner of the annual $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, one of the largest poetry prizes in the U.S., according to Time Magazine. Timothy Donnelly, the winner, has been poetry editor of the Boston Review since 1996 and teaches at the Writing Program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

 

Cops are seeking Jose Ortiz, 18, for questioning in the murder of Jairo Aguilar, 20, who was killed on Jan. 24 by a bullet fired at close range at Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street, according to the Daily News. Aguilar, a former Latin King, was being recruited by the Niños Malos gang, but he didn’t want anything to do with them.