It was the eve of the fifties, a time of McCarthyism and the fear of godless communism, but also a time of cautious hope for the future. Across America, homes were being built. Dreams took shape in frames, windows, and ridgepoles. The dream was so strong in one young husband and father that he uprooted his family and built the dream house himself. But at what cost?

Why did his life seem to go so wrong afterward - why the restlessness, the string of jobs, the endless moves that culminated in what became known as the Great Family Saga? And why, forty years later, does the house still exert such power over the imagination of his son, who was still a child when the family left the house behind?

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In this frank, soul-searching, and broadly appealing memoir, Tom Froncek goes home again - to pay tribute to his dream-struck father, and to try to make sense of the past. Reconstructing the building of the house that he witnessed with a child's awe, he finds again the hero his father was, but also more difficult truths.

From the memory of that dream house emerges a many-layered book: recounting the adventure of a fifties childhood, the conflicted relationship of a father and son, and the odyssey of a family in America's age of promise.