They divorced in 1953 after grueling nights in smoky clubs and weeks when money ran painfully thin yet Buck Owens and Bonnie Campbell never let go of the family they had built together
That unbreakable bond began around 1945 at the Mazona Roller Rink in the agricultural town of Mesa Arizona where sixteen year old farm laborer Alvis Buck Owens met fifteen year old radio singer Bonnie Campbell on the hardwood floor
Both teenagers were children of the Dust Bowl migration and their families had fled sharecropping land in Texas and Oklahoma to search for work in the Salt River Valley
Buck was born on August 12 1929 on a sharecropping farm near Sherman Texas and his family headed west in 1937 before their Model T Ford boiled over in Arizona while towing a homemade trailer toward California
Bonnie arrived forty nine days later on October 1 1929 in Blanchard Oklahoma as the fourth of eight children in a sharecropping family that picked cotton across the Southwest before settling in Gilbert and Mesa
To help feed his family Buck left school after the ninth grade and spent his days hauling produce digging ditches and harvesting cotton and citrus under the desert sun
At night his hands were calloused from field labor while he taught himself chords on an old mandolin and a guitar and listened closely to Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys on the family radio
Bonnie was already far ahead of him as a performer and she had won an amateur talent contest at the Orpheum Theatre in Phoenix before joining Mac McAtee and his band Mac’s Skillet Lickers as featured vocalist and yodeler on Mesa radio station KTYL
In a 1997 interview with The Bakersfield Californian she remembered that Buck was a capable roller skater but music was what drew her to him
I liked him because he played guitar
Bonnie and McAtee refused to look down on the shy boy from the produce trucks and they welcomed him into Mac’s Skillet Lickers on steel guitar rhythm guitar and mandolin
Soon the pair shared a regular fifteen minute live broadcast as Buck and Bonnie on KTYL singing close duet harmonies into a single studio microphone and announcing dance dates to working families across Maricopa County
Away from the studio their young courtship unfolded in the back of farm trucks and inside noisy roadhouses grange halls and VFW clubs where crowds tossed spare change onto the bandstand
On January 13 1948 the teenagers married and they welcomed their first son Alan Edgar known as Buddy Alan that May and their second son Michael Lynn followed in March 1950
Two babies changed everything and fifteen minute radio spots and weekend dances in Mesa could no longer pay the grocery bills
Buck had already traveled with his uncle to haul seasonal produce in California’s San Joaquin Valley where he saw that the booming oil field and farm taverns around Bakersfield paid musicians steady nightly wages
In 1951 Buck and Bonnie packed their belongings and their two young sons into their car and left Mesa for Bakersfield California
Bonnie worked shifts as a waitress and sang in local clubs while Buck played rhythm guitar and sang six nights a week with Bill Woods and the Orange Blossom Playboys at the Blackboard Cafe and appeared on Cousin Herb Henson’s Trading Post television show
Fifteen years after those tiny broadcasts in Mesa Buck returned to the Phoenix market in 1967 and 1968 as a millionaire country star and purchased radio stations KTUF-AM and KNIX-FM
The marriage had ended yet the respect born in Arizona fields and radio studios kept them side by side in Bakersfield raising the two boys they had carried west and holding onto a family story that helped launch the Bakersfield Sound