Audrey Maridale Kennedy's account of Kansas City life from the late 1920s to the late 1940s provides a glimpse into Prohibition-era culture, from music halls functioning as speakeasies to the exploits of "Boss Tom" Pendergast, head of the Kansas City political machine during the Roaring '20s.

The majority of Kennedy's autobiographical essay deals with the effects of the Great Depression on the Midwest in general and on her family in particular. Kennedy's father was a 67-year-old banker whose bank and savings and loan branches both failed. Kennedy discusses how her father and other men could not find jobs, though they answered every ad for jobs each day. Kennedy's account of this time in her family's life includes descriptions of renting out their home to tenants who stole from them and living in modest apartments while Kennedy's mother opened a bakery business. The family also mortgaged their home in order to open a secondhand goods shop. Kennedy's brother had to quit studying at Harvard University because his parents could not pay the tuition, and he found work in one of the New Deal programs. Kennedy highlights how precarious life was, but how President Roosevelt's New Deal did help her family and many others.

Kennedy went to work in an aircraft factory at the beginning of World War II, and discusses in her essay how the family went from underemployed to employed with wages to spare.