This is a story about a single father. Itas about labor and blue-collar work of the booming a50s. It is about a dysfunctional family, about cultural and religious differences, sibling rivalry and the unconventional view of a mother working outside the home. It is about an unhappy marriage five kids later, the grief of separation and the things missed about being a family intact. It is about being different, normal teenage issues, and about having odd role models. It is about learning the lessons of sacrifice, unconditional love, the trials and tears of childhood, about discrimination, a scary world and rebellion. It is the story about feeling caught somewhere in the middle in a world where everything seemed black and white. As the author Dolah Saleh states in her introduction: Everyone knows the story of the single mom. And today, we all realize that there is such a thing as a single dad. Still, in the 1950s, one might have been hard pressed to find an immigrant father from Yemen with a swing shift job at a steel plant raising five children on his own. This man was my father.