And in one of my favorite historic ironies, a 10-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. sang with the Ebenezer Baptist Church choir at the (segregated) premiere party.
If only Quentin Tarentino had heard this story 20 years ago!
“Back in 1862, as I went to answer the Union’s call to arms, my grandfather, who had fought in the Revolutionary War against the British, showed me a pocket watch – this watch – that he had bought in Boston on his way to Bunker Hill. For luck, he said. That watch I carried with me every day I fought those Johnny Rebs, then I put it in a tin until my son, your grandfather, went off to fight the Krauts in the Great War…”
You were 12 in 1938? You’re 82 years old, KlondikeGeoff? That’s awesome. We’ve done all sorts of various polls here, but are you the most senior member here on the Straight Dope?
[nitpick]James Longstreet[/nitpick]
She lived long after WW2 as well; she died in 1962 at age 99. A Confederate general’s wife (and though she was much younger she wasn’t a child bride- she was in her 30s and he was in his 70s when they married) actually lived to see JFK, which also shows what a young country it is.
A bit off topic, but a few years ago I was surprised to learn that the GAR sponsored ‘Retirement colonies’ in Florida - and helped start the migration of retirees south.
Soon after Alberta Martin’s death was announced, the newspapers revealed that Maudie Celia Hopkins was still alive. When she was about 19, she had married 86-year-old William Cantrell in 1934. However, Maudie died last year at the age of 93. So unless there’s an elderly woman somewhere out there keeping quiet about her place in history, it appears that there are indeed no surviving widows of Civil War veterans.
[Alan Gurganus joke]
The question is, did either of them “tell all”? 
[/Alan Gurganus joke]
Though the possibility certainly exists. Some whose whose pension was invalidated by the new legislation or by remarriage may never even have mentioned it to their children (by the next husband) since they were probably a bit embarassed by marrying a 90 year old when they were 18.
That book was actually inspired by an article about the May-December pension marriages. Originally he planned to write it about a teenager-ancient pension union, but decided it would be a much better novel to make it a “real” marriage (i.e. consummated and kids and all). He also planned to call it “The Last Surviving Confederate Widow Tells All” but changed that when widows started popping up all over the place; the death of the last one would be announced and followed by a “scratch that— we found one here and she says ‘I’m not dead yet’”.
Also a case of a great idea for a novel not being fully carried out as it has too many plotholes and omissions. One of the biggest is her children: in the book Lucy has 9 children and has outlived them all, some of them dying of old age- though in fact they’d only be in their 70s or early 80s at the most- and she has no grandchildren, which while possible is unlikely with that many kids. Also the fact that her husband was barely a CSA veteran, having joined when about 14 in the last year of the war; it would have been more interesting to make him a few years older, and also not the “we’ve seen it to death” plantation mansion/veranda class as it’s amazing how seldom the yeoman farmer class of the Civil War (the vast majority) appears in novels about the war.