After a day of picking cotton in late 1860, Ella May, a young slave, joins her friends Bobby and Sue at their second job of listening outside the windows of their master's house for useful information.
As the Apollo 11 mission draws to a close there is a crisis at the tracking station on Guam: the antenna that will track the spacecraft during reentry, and allow mission control to communicate with the astronauts is stuck--and ten-year-old Marty is the only one small enough to reach in and grease the ball bearings that allow the antenna to move.
"In Depression-era northern Michigan, a young boy meets a teenager serving in the Civilian Conservation Corps, the work relief program established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to employ millions of young men during the Great Depression." --