This is the story of an East Texas farm boy, the war in the Pacific, and love. The boy left his farm, experienced the unspeakable horrors of war, and returned a man, wanting only to go back to work on the farm. His pursuit of paradise, which had taken him through the dark, steamy, enemy-infested, disease-ridden jungles of the South Pacific and the post-war landscape of Japan, now led him to his dream wife, who, in his absence, had grown from child to woman, and greeted him with open arms and a commitment to share his pursuit forever. Together, they would find Paradise is not a Place, but is a Time. For them, it was the journey they took, the path they walked with each other the rest of their lives. Their pursuit of paradise was set against the backdrop of the most tumultuous, traumatic, and societally pivotal half-century in American history. The Great Depression. The War to End All Wars. The Petrochemical Industry. The Dust Bowl. The Agricultural Revolution. The Big War. The buildup of the largest war machine in history. The victory of Freedom over fanatical Tyranny in Europe. The Atomic Bomb. The victory of Democracy over Bushido Imperialism in Japan. The massive industrial change-over from War to Peace. The beginning of the Baby Boomers. In 1900, industrialization was developing in the United States on equal footing with Europe. By 1950, the United States had clearly become the industrial leader of the world. A farming society, scattered throughout the hamlets, villages, and small towns of America, was pulled like an innocent, unsuspecting, blameless lamb to the altar of Change. Society experienced the mechanization of the working man, from the traditional, comfortable world of farms and tools to a new, modern world of cities and shift-work. Most adapted and survived, and became the very foundation of who we are. Those who did not adapt were lost forever in the ghost towns, ghost jobs, and ghost families that haunted the post-war landscape. The love story of Horace Garlton "Red" Smith and Clara Juliette "Judy" Smith is not unique. It is shared by those families that now look back to that dynamic half-century in amazement, wonder, and reverence for the incomparable tenacity, resilience, honesty, humility, and simplicity of that generation. It is the story of my parents. It is the story for all baby-boomers who had parents like them. We know what they did, what they survived, what they sacrificed, and, in the end, what they stood for. They did heroic and honorable things that we, in their shoes, would probably not have been able to do. They were as fragile as us, yet their stoicism rose above their fragility, and their story is the stuff that legends are made of. May the telling of their story help us follow their example.