There’s a saying that everyone in life is given 15 minutes of fame, but the problem is that you never no when it will come or why it will happen. For 76-year-old Navan resident Ray Vetter, his 15 minutes of fame happened last December with the appearance of a couple of recordings he made over five decades ago in Trail, B.C.

Vetter was 19 years old at the time and enjoyed playing the guitar and listening to rockabilly artists like Eddie Cochrane, Carl Perkins and, of course, the king himself – Elvis Presley. He had just moved to Trail from Saskatoon where he had been living with his parents.

Navan resident Ray Vetter holds up the record he record back in 1966 along with the promo sheet that came with it. FRED SHERWIN PHOTO

““My intention was to work on the Columbia River project which was a union job, but then they wanted me to pay for a union card and it would take me awhile before I could get one of those good-paying jobs, so I went to the employment office in Trail to see if there was anything else available and I ended up getting a sales job for the local grocery store that paid me 30 per cent more than the union job would have,” says Vetter.

When he arrived in B.C., he started hanging out in various establishments and performing here and there.

“A few of my friends said ‘hey, you have a good voice you should cut a record’,” recalls Vetter.

He ended up recording two of his own original songs at the local radio station. The first one was “Come Home Baby” and the second was “Baby Love Me Too”. He even hired musicians to join in on the session. They were called The Versatiles.

The result was a 45 rpm record with “Baby Love Me Too” on the A-side and “Come Home Baby” on the B-side. It was pressed in California and delivered to him in October 1966. He paid $240 for 500 copies of the record.

“I put them in music stores all over B.C. and shipped them across Canada to various music stations. They cost 66 cents and sold for a dollar,” says Vetter.

Unfortunately, he didn’t sell that many and the only radio station that played it with any regularity was the station in Trail.

“I ended up with hundreds of the things. In fact, I still have close to a hundred of them,” says Vetter, who played in small bands until the early 70s. “We would do weddings, and birthday parties... pretty well anything. We had a guy that sang country songs, another guy could play polkas and I sang all the rock and roll songs.”

Vetter stopped performing in the early ’70s, although he still loves singing and playing the guitar, he never recorded anything else. Skip ahead 50 plus years to last Christmas, when his grandson Ben informed him that he was famous. It turns out someone acqui-red the record somehow and posted it on YouTube with the heading “Teen Rocker Ray Vetter”. Since then both songs have accumulated over 750 visits.

Vetter gets a chuckle over the fact that his songs are now out there for the world to listen to. “It took 50 some years and I’m still not getting paid for it,” he jokes.