For Peggy Patton and her six siblings, life during the Depression in Franklin County, North Carolina, is a hard one lived in extreme poverty. Somehow they managed to get by...until the night in 1940 when her father falls ill and subsequently suffers a fatal heart attack. William "Billy" Ray Griffin, Jr., a depression-error baby himself, is born in Durham, North Carolina, one year earlier than Peggy. One of four children, his family struggles to keep food on the table when, in 1945, five years after the death of Richard Patton, Billy's father, William Sr., also suffers a fatal heart attack....