Taking a break from practicing for a holiday dance performance to accompany her friend Davy to the beach, Maryellen finds a barnacle-encrusted ring buried in the sand that looks like lost treasure and is desperately sought by a group of strangers.

Come back with us to those thrilling days of yesteryear, to the days of bobby sox, soda fountains, Elvis Presley and American Bandstand, hot rods and James Dean. But come back, too, to the "fabulous era" remembered less nostalgically as "a moral disaster" and "one of the worst decades in the history of man." Here is the first in-depth social and cultural history of the fifties: the decade that brought America the anticommunist hysteria of the McCarthy...