Dunn recalls his home town of Fitzgerald, Georgia, circa 1946, touring the town which is rich in history and tradition. This is a true slice of nostalgic small-town Americana.

This true saga recounts the life of the author's mother, who earned the nickname of the book's title. A small woman, what she lacked in stature, she gained in spirit. Poverty, disappointment with her family, tragedy and poor health demanded every spark of her spirit as the years passed. She married a penniless Southern lad whose only assets were the clothes on his back and an indomitable will to work and succeed. They faced the storms of life together. The only thing that ever trembled on that frail little Yankee woman was her chin.

After the Civil War, railroads were built to link the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts of the reunited nation. South of the Mason-Dixon line, work gangs were either Negro or Irish. The O'Dunn family was employed for three generations as Trackmen that built or maintained railroad tracks in the Southern states. Teddie O'Dunn was a telegrapher-depot agent, or "lightning slinger." Born in Tennessee, the youngest child of a rowdy Irish father and an orphan girl raised in West Virginia, he was named for President Teddie Roosevelt. His boyhood days were spent in the Civil War prison camp in the town of Andersonville, Georgia. He learned telegraphy at the knee of a kindly woman agent-operator at the Central of Georgia Railroad Depot. Sixty miles southeast of Andersonville was a Colony City, Fitzgerald. Teddie went to Fitzgerald to work as a lightning slinger on the railroad connecting the new town to Atlanta and Florida. His family admonished him to have no association with Yankee girls that paraded the sidewalks of Fitzgerald. But Teddie was lightning struck, so to speak, by a small bundle of charm, the granddaughter of a Calvary man in General Sherman's army. Their trials, tribulations and heartaches through their years fill this book