Summary

Chapter Two delves more deeply into Joe Rantz’s childhood. He was the second-born son to Harry and Nellie Rantz, born fourteen years after his older brother Frank. Joe’s father was a natural-born inventor with big dreams and a penchant for tinkering. Joe’s childhood probably would have been blissful and happy had his mother not died of throat cancer when Joe was only four-years-old. His mother’s death signaled the first of many times Joe was uprooted from his home, sent to live with various relatives. He spent a year living in the attic of a cold, distant aunt, feeling terribly frightened, homesick, and alone, before Fred summoned for him to live with him in Pennsylvania. Fred, who was now twenty-one, had recently married Thelma LaFollette, one daughter in a set of twins from a...