Robert Veitch

2.14 Miles of Interstate 91 Robert Veitch

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.