This colorful memoir of growing up in the Fifties and early Sixties in Newport provides a rich and multi-layered description of the city in the days before the building of the Newport Bridge. Then the island was still isolated from the mainland and only accessible from Jamestown by ferry. Downtown Thames Street had its seamy side with sailors and marines fighting in honky-tonk bars as Destroyer Fleet Atlantic brought troops back from Korea. Still, it was the summer home of the Vanderbilts, the Astors and Goelets, and the aspiring young author greeted both Eisenhower and Kennedy at the Summer White House and made a car trip to Amherst to meet Robert Frost.