Short answers, pulled from the story.
Buddy Holly died on the 3rd of February 1959, when a chartered Beechcraft Bonanza aircraft crashed into a cornfield five miles northwest of Clear Lake, Iowa, shortly after takeoff. He was 22 years old. Ritchie Valens, J. P. Richardson (the Big Bopper), and pilot Roger Peterson also died in the crash.
Holly's birth surname was Holley, with an e. When Decca Records signed him in February 1956, the contract contained a clerical misspelling, rendering it Holly. He adopted the misspelled version as his professional name from that point forward.
On the 21st of October 1958, Holly recorded four songs at the Pythian Temple on West 70th Street in New York, backed by an 18-piece ensemble of former NBC Symphony Orchestra members. The songs were "True Love Ways", "Moondreams", "Raining in My Heart", and "It Doesn't Matter Anymore". They were the only recordings Coral Records ever mixed in stereo.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney modeled their early act around Holly's performance style and lyricism after seeing him on Sunday Night at the London Palladium. Inspired by Holly's insect-named Crickets, they chose the name the Beatles. Lennon's prior band the Quarrymen covered "That'll Be the Day" in their first recording session, in 1958, and McCartney later acquired the publishing rights to Holly's entire song catalog.
Holly formed the Crickets to release music while still under contract with Decca Records, which prohibited him from recording the same songs under his own name. Producer Norman Petty also calculated that disc jockeys would play records from two separate acts -- the Crickets on Brunswick and Buddy Holly on Coral -- where they would have hesitated to play multiple new releases by a single artist. Holly himself was unaware of this strategy.
Holly's signature horn-rimmed glasses were discovered in March 1980 in a Cerro Gordo County courthouse storage area by Sheriff Gerald Allen. They had been found in the spring of 1959 after the snow melted at the crash site and placed in an envelope dated the 7th of April 1959, then misplaced when the county moved courthouses. After a legal contest, the frames were returned to Holly's widow Maria Elena Santiago and are now on display at the Buddy Holly Center in Lubbock, Texas.