Karen a month after James Dean's Death	Protrait of Annabele Coombe

September 30, 1955, Cholame, 6 P.M.

"And there was another man behind me, in a panic, shaking, and offering me anything I wanted if I could help his friend. But I knew he was gone."

Annabele Coombe, the nurse who came upon the scene. 

James Dean lost his mother when he was nine years old, and legend has him dying lonely on a highway. But recent research has uncovered that he was not without the ministrations of a wonderful woman in his last moments--a woman who never forgot the day when she came upon the crumpled Porsche at the intersection of highways 41 and 466 on September 30, 1955.

On September 30, 1955, Annabelle Coombe-- Kay to her friends-- was a Registered Nurse at the Paso Robles, California, War Memorial Hospital twenty eight miles west of Cholame. A poster-child for Middle-American achievement and values, in 1934 she had graduated at the top of her class at Blackhawk Nursing College in Moline, Illinois, and married her high-school sweetheart Robert Coombe.  Opportunities soon looked better for both in Iowa, so they moved to Davenport. It was in Davenport that daughter Karen was born in 1938. Eventually, they would locate to Paso Robles on the Central Coast of California along highway 101. Kay continued her nursing at War Memorial and daughter Karen enrolled at Paso Robles High School and supported her football team, the Bearcats, while older sister Diane attended nursing college.
That warm September 30th evening in Paso Robles at about 5:30 p.m., Kay, Robert and Diane got into their Oldsmobile and headed out of town, east on the highway 466 en route to Bakersfield where the home team would be competing against their number-one rival, the Bakersfield Drillers.

The drive for the first twentyfive miles was uneventful. The sun had gone down below the hills behind them to the west and the daylight they had when they left was giving way to dusk as it neared 6 p.m.
Twenty-six miles east of Paso Robles, they passed the general store, garage and post office in the area known as Cholame. As they rounded a curve, they noticed people and some cars parked on the roadside and there appeared to be an ambulance. A black and white 1950 Ford Tudor was spun sideways, its left-front fender and bright chrome grill devastated by an apparent collision. Kay saw a young man—presumably the driver-- Ford, head down.

The big two-toned, Buick ambulance's doors were open. Kay asked Robert to stop. She might be of help to any occupants of a smaller car crumpled near a barbed wire fence on the roadside.
Bill Hickman and Sandy Roth had already arrived. They had been following James Dean and his mechanic Rolf Wuetherich since they left Competition Motors in Hollywood two-hundred miles south. 
Kay examined the man in the mangled Porsche racer. He had a broken neck. She pressed her forefinger to his wrist and realized there was a very faint pulse. James Dean was dying. 
"I saw he was not going to live. And there was another man there behind me, in a panic, shaking, and offering me anything I wanted if I could help his friend," Kay remembered. "But I knew he was already gone"
She checked on Rolf Wuetherich who was lying prone beside the Porsche, badly injured, but alive.  The Ford’s driver seemed to be sadly relating his version of the crash to an officer who had just arrived on the scene.