In 1963 when Lois Kulwicki s father loses his job at Studebaker along with hundreds of other workers he acts as if he has just been promoted He buys a new car the only non Studebaker he s ever purchased and takes his family on vacation On the way home Mom dumps Dad at a Stuckey s and that s the last they see of him Thirty years later Lois has a family of her own as fractured as her childhood family Divorced but still living with her ex she decides to move out with her two daughters and start over but then a stranger named Henry enters their lives Out of this ersatz family Lois tries to recover something of what she lost beginning with a search for her abandoned father The Last Studebaker is a warmly comic tale of lives changed forever after the last Studebaker rolled off of the assembly line