“Wait a minute Dad”, I said to my father as he began a left turn into the Eldorado Ranch driveway off of US 395, less than a mile west of Standish, California. He was driving the family station wagon, a 1956 Ford Country Squire, with all seven of us aboard. He had been stopped, waiting for an oncoming pick up truck to pass by in the opposite direction. It had slowed and turned right down the irrigation canal road a few hundred feet before reaching us, without signaling. What my father did not see was the car approaching from behind us. Instead of slowing, it switched lanes to pass. Dad stepped on the gas… Less than two seconds later, the paths of seven lives were altered forever, one of them reduced to just ten minutes of gasping for breath and bleeding from the nose and ears. My mother’s death at 33 on July 3, 1960, was the reason that we came to employ a series of full time, live-in housekeepers. My father mentioned more than once that some day he was going to write a book about them. But, as is the case for most of us, life intervened and it never happened.
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Vern Fuller was a 25 year old cowboy with a broken leg when he first laid eyes on Lorraine DeVeau. He worked the Smoke Creek Ranch in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert and blew off steam in Susanville, California. A rodeo bronc ride somewhat short of the required eight seconds was his ticket to Riverside Hospital. She was a newly minted Registered Nurse from Boston, Massachusetts, with a summer job far from home – and a fiance’ named Vernon. Eleven years and five boys later, the unlikely marriage ended on a hot Sunday afternoon.
