The autobiographical story of a young man who was born into a “Sharecropping” family in Texas just before the Great Depression. Sherwood describes some of the details of his daily life and times growing up in a large family living on the edge of survival, both good times and bad. He takes us through his childhood, adolescence and coming of age in rural Texas. Seeing no future in sharecropping, he joins his brothers in California where he tells how he was able to obtain a much prized high school diploma despite major obstacles. The country now at war, he tells how he prepared to serve his country and the three years he spent island hopping in the Pacific during WWII in a unique squadron of the United States Army Air Corps. The end of the war is not the end of his story, though. With the hope and determination that carried him and his generation through so much, he tells how he re-entered civilian life in Sacramento, California, went back to work at McClellan AFB and then met and married the woman who has been his wife for over sixty years.