LAUDERHILL, Florida -

It was a Thursday, April Fools Day, 1976 and Barbara Cosgrove was driving her beautiful, three day old Lincoln Mark IV over the Brooklyn Bridge. At the time the bridge was being painted, and about 200 feet above, a tarp hung that helped prevent paint from falling onto the cars below. Heavy rains caused the tarp to give way, sending an extreme amount of water crashing onto Barbara Cosgrove’s new luxury ride, smashing the hood and windshield. Barbara recalled that she screamed so loud that she caused damage to her own eardrums. She then turned off the car and passed out.

Unfortunately, Barbara did have a brief hospital stay, but upon being released she and her insurance company wasted no time in filing a claim against the Belt Painting Co., which was doing the paint work on the bridge. She had hoped there would be an eventual settlement, but as time went on nothing came of it. In July of 1978 Barbara wrote a letter to her attorney asking him to pursue the settlement, but for unknown reasons she never mailed it. She eventually gave up the idea of a settlement as a lost cause.

Time passed and Barbara and her husband moved on. From time to time she thought about the accident and the claim against the Belt Painting Co., but as more years came and went the incident pushed itself further from her memory. In the time since the accident she had moved to Miami Beach and then to Lauderhill, Florida, where she has spent the last 15 years. Sometime in the mid 1980s Barbara and her husband got divorced, and she was able to keep the furniture from the divorce settlement.

In early 2010, 34 years after the accident on the bridge, 85-year-old Barbara was at home with a friend, who asked to see a picture of Barbara’s ex-husband. Barbara went into the bottom drawer of a nightstand she had received from her divorce settlement, looking for a picture. Barbara said she had been in the drawer thousands of times over the years. But this time she pulled out something different, something she had never seen before. It was an envelope, whose corners were eaten away by time. Inside, Barbara found the shock of her life. On the piece of paper in the envelope was the date January 23, 1978, a year and a half after the bridge accident and six months before she wrote the letter to her attorney. The paper inside the tattered envelope wanted something from Barbara, it wanted her signature. But not just any signature, it wanted her to endorse the check that was inside, a check for $17,500, the settlement she had at some point received for the accident. The settlement she had no memory of receiving. Printed on the check it read, VOID if not cashed within 60 days.

It is highly unlikely that Barbara will ever get her money. The company that wrote the check, The Home Insurance Companies of Manchester, N.H., was declared insolvent and was liquidated in June 2004. After the check was found and Barbara was interviewed she went on record saying, “When the money wasn’t deposited, why shouldn’t they have followed up and said ‘Why haven’t you cashed the check?’ “

Oh, Barbara…….Barbara, Barbara, Barbara……that’s not the way the real world works, dear. The company sent you the check, it’s not their responsibility to nudge you and remind you not to forget to spend their money. When you never cashed the check, it just meant the highest ranking corporate officers in the company got the Christmas party of their lives in 1978. I really don’t want to pick on you too much, Barbara. I know you’ve been through enough with this, but, my dear, what the hell happened? You’re older now and I know you feel awful about it, so I’ll try to take it easy on you, but I just have to ask one thing, “Why did you give it up so easily and why didn’t you mail that letter to your attorney?”

And there’s one more thing I have yet to mention. Ask anyone, $17,500 is A LOT of cash in 2010, but imagine what it was worth in 1978. Do I even dare tell you? You know I’m going to. I checked several online inflation calculators and we’re talking an inflation change of 235%. $17,500 in 1978 is equal to $58,630.10 in 2010. That one’s gonna sting a little.

It appears as though the longest April Fools joke in the history of mankind, a 32 year long epic prank, was pulled on Barbara Cosgrove by none other than fate itself.

The moral of the story: Barbara, I know hindsight is a bastard, but ya probably should have sent that letter to your attorney on that fine Summer day in 1978, he probably could have told you to check your nightstand drawer.

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