The Last Studebaker

In 1963, when Lois Kulwicki's father loses his job at Studebaker along with hundreds of other workers, he acts as if he has just been promoted. He buys a new car (the only non-Studebaker he's ever purchased) and takes his family on a vacation to the New York World's Fair. On the way home, Lois's mother abandons her father at a Stuckey's, and that's the last they see of him. Thirty years later, Lois has a family of her own, but one that's as fractured as her childhood family. Divorced but still living with her ex, she makes the decision to move out with her two daughters and start over on their own. But then a stranger named Henry enters their lives. Traumatized by the death of his girlfriend and her son, deaths he inadvertently caused, he moves onto Lois's porch. Despite the protests of her 16-year-old daughter Gail (herself involved in a destructive relationship with a much older man), Lois lets him stay. Out of this ersatz family, Lois tries to recover something of what she has lost, beginning with a search for her abandoned father. The Last Studebaker is a warmly comic tale of lives changed forever when the Studebaker Corporation abruptly closes its doors.