March 11, 2015

By Jim Nowlan
Outside Columnist

Ida Mae and I were classmates in our rural high school, decades ago. Ida Mae often came to school in worn, dirty clothes, but she was attractive underneath it all. I liked her, though we came from different sides of the track and didn’t mix much.

Many years later I received a long, wrenching letter from Ida Mae, in which she spilled her guts about her high school years.

She was horribly abused by her stepfather, she wrote. Life was absolutely wretched.

    Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.