Like a great number of young people growing up in the years between World War I and World War II, Robert Rogers Chaffin's father-in-law, George Lafever, had a difficult life. He was orphaned at a young age and took to the rails when still barely a teenager. Through pictures, letters, a life sketch, and remembrances of his entertaining stories, his unique life has been memorialized in this book, which includes the great northern migration during the nineteen-twenties and thirties as well as the greater story of the whole Upper Cumberland Region. In the trying days and hardships of the Great Depression, George Lafever and his generation were put through a trial by fire which refined their character as the furnace refines gold. The pure toughness and resolve of their generation proved the salvation of freedom and democracy in the anxiety filled days of the Second World War.