For Clarence, a two-year-old Minnesota boy, the terrible twos were terrible. His mother was killed in an auto accident, boiling water scalded his arm, and a rooster nearly pecked out one of his eyes. Things weren’t much better at six. Tumbling into a stream, a broken bottle pierced his elbow and doctors contemplated amputating the arm. At eight, his luck changed. During a summer at an Ojibwe Indian camp, he took on a new identity as White Eagle, found friends, developed skills, and gained wisdom from a 103-year-old Indian lady named Grandma Baker - experiences that forged a self-reliant character which allowed him to adapt to being shuffled off to live in an orphanage and with a series of relatives.

The book chronicles the childhood of Paul C. Slayback, a young boy who grew up in northeastern Minnesota in the 1940s. Slayback tells entertaining stories of growth and learning, triumph and tragedy, victory and defeat. His earthy and vulnerable voice elicits empathy and laughter, and rekindles memories of a simpler time. Losing a mother, living with relatives, gaining a friend, swimming down the Mississippi, diving off high cliffs, ski-jumping off a mountain, squaring off with a bully, working on a farm, falling in love before he even imagined love, a dance with religion, discovering the soothing comfort of nature, fishing, and hunting with a dog. Slayback's stories are timeless tales of boyhood from another era.