In 1928, with the Great Depression just ahead and horse-drawn buggies and Model Ts sharing the road, a baby boy was about to begin his struggle on the rough road of life. This is a time capsule of his life in the rural Midwest. Sprinkled with history and local color, it is a story uniquely defined by the automobiles that captured one man's attention-as he drove them and they drove him-through every chapter of his life. He was a little boy who loved anything with wheels, who would grow up to become a state highway mechanic. Every milestone of his journey was centered around some sort of wheeled vehicle-toy camel, wagon, tractors, trucks...and cars. Before he turned six, his mother took sick and was dead within the week, and his father couldn't keep up with the strain of raising five kids while working another man's farm. When the family got parceled out, he was passed off to relatives who sent him to an orphanage. From there he was fostered out as child labor, only to run away and get caught-and end up, for want of a better solution, at a reform school. At eighteen, he finally found a family-not his own, but one who would become his. Because they made him part of theirs.