Several months after Mount Saint Helens exploded, a Boeing engineer's long-term dream ended in tragedy when his self-built Bede Aircraft crashed on its maiden cross-country flight in an undetected micro-storm over DeKalb, Illinois. He and his wife miraculously survived initial injuries but were left paraplegic and unaware if their lives would continue. Their story is told by their oldest daughter, focusing on her mother's relentless drive to achieve respect and acceptance all through her marriage-especially from her in-laws-and how her lack of any ethnic social status impacted everyone around her. Included is the mother's heroic history she never knew of her own parents, about their separate emigration from Old Country Galician (Ukrainian) villages on the north side of the Carpathian Mountains just before World War I closed the borders, and their subsequent struggles among the lowest of the low classes in America.