A young boy growing up in rural Pennsylvania during the Depression is worried about his father's position as teacher at the local high school. As a child the boy only relates to his father as a beloved dad, but as he grows older, throughout the WWII years, he sees that his father is a chatty free spirit who clowns around for the children at the high school and isn't taken particularly seriously by them. His worries about his father's status are epitomised when his father plays Thisbe in a school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream to the mirth of the entire school, but he sees in the following days that rather than ruining his father's reputation, this has changed nothing. As he grows through his teen years he worries less about social status and sees instead how his father is valued, and how his father values him as a whole person, and by the time he graduates school post-WWII, he views himself and his father as a team.