Five months after the accident, Larry Cox's fiancée Peggy Selby gave birth to their son.
Larry Cox Jr. was a Christmas Day baby in 1967, the legacy of a man who was Selby's whole life.
She was 14 when she met Cox at a Tucson bowling alley where The Dearly Beloved was performing. It was the summer before her freshman year, and he was a 17-year-old senior at Catalina High School. Within a couple months the two were dating.
She was 17 and a senior at Palo Verde High School when she got pregnant.
Now 62, Selby has never gotten over losing Cox. It is a hurt that hasn't healed much in 45 years.
She's tried to move on, she says. She married Tucson musician Alex Valdez a couple of years after Cox was killed and had a daughter in 1971. But the marriage failed after a decade. She's never remarried.
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She raised her son in Tucson, with plenty of love and support from Cox's parents, Charlie and Ruth.
"Ruth and Charlie were extremely nice to me. I loved them like parents," she says. "They lost a son but they gained a daughter and a grandson."
Selby says her son joined the military when he was 19. He is now a Marine reservist, serving as a medic in Afghanistan, she says.
"He's very kind," she says. "He's an old soul."
Larry Cox Jr.'s wife and two daughters live in Texas, where Selby lived for several years after her son was grown.
She retired from her human resources job in Texas last fall and returned to Tucson.
"Something is pulling me here. Something has made me come back," she says.
The accident and the days that followed return to her in scenes starting with the police coming to her door with the bad news.
"I just remember looking at my dad and falling down," she says.
The days surrounding the funeral remain mostly a blur - the packed service, visiting with the Cox family, listening as they talked about her precious cargo "that was made even more precious" after the accident, she says.
As the years went by, the hurt dulled a bit, but it never disappeared. Last spring, she says, memories came flooding back when she found letters from Cox, an unopened card, a pair of his Levis and a white T-shirt in a dusty box in her attic.
And with those memories came that familiar ache that has eaten away at her since that day.
"I thought it was guilt because I hadn't been to the cemetery," she says. "So I went to the cemetery. Then I thought maybe I need to go to Yuma and find where he died. I went to Yuma and I was in the general area, but I couldn't pinpoint it. I went to all the houses that I lived in and all the houses that he lived in. Then I went to the house that his parents lived in and where he lived the day he died."
A contractor renovating that house allowed her in for a tour. Nothing had changed, she says. The kitchen was still painted yellow. Cox's room was still tan and his younger sister's room was still lilac.
She gave the contractor her number and asked him to pass it along to the Realtor when they were ready to sell.
Two months later, the contractor called. He had found writing on the wall of Cox's bedroom closet: "Larry Cox loves Peggy Selby."
She says the worker cut out the piece of drywall and gave it to her -providing some of the comfort that had eluded her so long.
"I go to the cemetery at least once a week now," she says. "Somehow I have found some peace whereas before I had no peace."
