The son of a carpenter from Dayton, Ohio, Gene Adams had several early jobs of note. The first was a job delivering ice to, among others, the Wright Brothers home, then came a job at the Dayton Library, followed by Gene meeting and working for a man who became his mentor, Arthur E. Morgan, an engineer who became head of Antioch College, which Gene then attends. As Antioch's president, Morgan starts a program where students spend every other term off campus working. Gene's final "coop job" was for the globe's largest bank. During Republican Herbert Hoover's administration, Gene is the bank's liaison with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and its powerful head Jessie Jones.

The Great Depression is at its deepest and the leaders of National City Bank of New York are among those who stand accused of helping to bring it on. But a new Democratic president has been elected. Gene Adams goes to Washington D.C. as National City Bank's representative during the First 100 Days of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration. Being gone to D.C. often, Gene misses time in N.Y.C. with his infant twin daughters Janet and Joanne. After being the bank's D.C. liaison for nearly a decade, the bank's educational foundation pays for a mysterious "vacation" through Western Europe with ten Antiochians as nations there are threatened by attack from Hitler's Germany.

Having been through England, and having crossed the English Channel at Dover to land on the European continent at Calais, Gene Adams trip with the ten Antiochians stops first at a monument to those who died in the area during Word War One, then continues to Bruge and through a series of other Belgian towns. The group of young men drive their Thornton-Loomis camping truck through a number of French towns before reaching Paris, then traveling south and then east into Switzerland and Italy. Thereafter, their trip takes them through Germany at the exact time the German Army is mobilizing throughout the nation for blitzkrieg, or lightning war.