2.14 Miles of Interstate 91

About the Book

1964 was a violent time: Kennedy was murdered in Dallas just a few months before, Vietnam was a bubbling police action, soon to boil over into war, and the South was being desegregated one bloody confrontation at a time. Construction crews were ripping and blasting through Vermont's virgin forests, building Interstate 91, the road that would drag Vermont into the present. It was a violent time for Rick Wallace, working as a grunt laborer, chucking steel for drillers, and hauling dynamite to blast the ledges on the 2.14- mile segment of Interstate 91, that non-union B.V. DeBoni & Sons, had snatched out from under the noses of the big unionized contractors. The union, determined to make the Interstate a closed shop, wooed DeBoni's crew of moonlighting, hardscrabble farmers, while hot-tempered Charlie DeBoni vowed he'd go union "over my dead body." But it was union organizer, Big Jim Jenson, who died in a fiery explosion, and Whitey, DeBoni's head mechanic, and only black employee, was the prime suspect because he and Jenson had gone toe-to-toe over union bigotry. Sleepy Bellows Falls was suddenly engulfed in racist terror, and Rick Wallace, and his guitar-playing buddy, Jack North, took on the local bigots to help their friend, Whitey. But who killed Jim Jenson? Forty years later, Rick still needed to know the answer.

About the Author

R.D. Veitch is a free-lance writer and business consultant. Born in Vermont, he worked his way through college as a construction laborer, building Interstate 91. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota with his wife Mary Jane and is working on his second novel.