“Is your mother Mary Lane Alexander?”
“Yes,” replied Richard Lane, a Detroit minister and son of the late Dick (Night Train) Lane and a woman who hailed from tiny Ballplay, Alabama (pop. 1,114 today) in Etowah County. A woman who was the baby of Hurley and Electa Cowser’s 10 children raised on their farm. A woman who left Ballplay as fast as she could, following her older sister to Clark College in the mid-1950s.
A woman who became…