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Tricia Moulton's College Raft Trip Recounted in Best-Selling Novel

Take 16 college girls, a retired riverboat captain, a raft named Rosebud Hobson, two cabin boys, and one wide, rambling river, and what you have is a recipe for adventure. You also have The Last Girls, a new novel by writer Lee Smith based on the adventure. And you have a raft-full of colorful memories to savor for the rest of your life-just ask Tricia Moulton, SDSU director of planned giving and board member of the Friends of the SDSU Library, who was one of those 16 girls on the raft trip.

Moulton was a college student at Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, when she and her classmates dreamed up their 11-day, Huckleberry Finn-like adventure. Moulton took responsibility for organizing the trip, and she was the one who located Captain Gordon Cooper, a 70-year-old retired riverboat captain who agreed to pilot the raft 950 miles from Paducah, Kentucky, down the Mississippi River to New Orleans free of charge. Jimmy Middleton and Bob Whitton signed on to help with the motors, equipment, and navigation. But before they could launch their voyage on June 9, 1966, they had to register their craft, which required giving the raft a name.

"We wanted to name it after a Hollins College graduate," Moulton said. "We looked through the Hollins College yearbooks and found a lady in Paducah, Kentucky, named Rosebud Hobson who had attended Hollins in the early 1900s. She was no longer alive, but her sister was, and she was very excited about us naming the raft after Rosebud."

Moulton and her companions became overnight sensations. Television crews and reporters met them at every stop, even dogging them in the middle of the river via seaplane. They were made honorary citizens of Greenville, Natchez and Vicksburg, Mississippi, and of New Orleans. Roses, candy bars, and notes were dropped to them from airplanes, and people onshore often greeted them with fried chicken and other edibles, which were welcomed treats for weary travelers subsisting on tuna fish and corned-beef sandwiches.

The trip left a lasting impression on the girls, perhaps especially on Lee Smith, who borrows from her college adventure for The Last Girls. "It's fiction based on an actual trip, told in flashbacks," Moulton explained. "The book is about four girls who were on this trip who have gotten back together in Memphis to take the Belle of Natchez to New Orleans. They've been asked by the husband of another girl on the raft trip to scatter her ashes in the river when they reach New Orleans."

The Last Girls has received positive reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist, The Boston Globe, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, to name a few. It holds the no. 33 spot on the New York Times Hardcover Fiction Best Seller List during the last week of January 2003.

(above) Last Girl Tricia Moulton in her SDSU office, January 2003.

(above) Captain Gordon Cooper and Tricia Moulton in 1966. Moulton is wearing her "Rosebud" T-shirt.