The Last Day of a Hundred Years

By Deborah Rose

The writer recreates four days in March 1952 when a tragic accident took her young mother's life and revealed the secret she had kept from her family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9781257413560

Book preview

Friday, March 7, 1952

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Clara Ann glanced in the rearview mirror of her 1939 Buick Roadmaster, watching the city grow farther and farther behind. Although the car was twelve years old, it still ran pretty good. But with the heater pumping out weak drafts of slightly warmed air, no radio, and questionable tires, the trip from Chicago to southern Indiana was going to be a long one.

She shifted in her seat as her thoughts drifted back to her baby daughter. Clara Ann had left her behind with her boyfriend, Gary, while she drove 350 miles down Highway 41 south to help Ricky, her young son, celebrate his fourth birthday. She hadn’t yet found the courage to tell her mother, Frances, that she had gotten pregnant again and then, well, time slipped by as it tends to do.

The baby’s birth four months ago had been a surprise. Clara Ann certainly never intended to get pregnant. At least not so soon after leaving Ricky with her mother in Indiana while she moved to Chicago to live with friends, meet some new people, and have some fun away from the stifling small town of Vincennes, Indiana, where she had lived her entire life.

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Before she married Ricky’s father, Clara Ann was a free spirit, living life on her own terms with an Old Grandad in one hand and smoke curling into the air from the ever present cigarette held carelessly in the other. She and her best friends, Betty Lou and Betty May, called themselves the Three Musketeers and she smiled, looking forward to seeing them