When I first proposed to read this story aloud to my children, my oldest, then perhaps 8 or 9 years old, protested loudly! She thought it was going to be a series of numbers and notes about expenditures that I was going to read to her. It only took a little persuading and a few pages before she was hooked. This is a true story - really a set of simple reminiscences - about a Norwegian immigrant family living in San Francisco in the early 1900s (somewhere between the 1906 earthquake and World War I).