Vermont Summer: The Way We Were is the story of a boy growing up in the 1930s in a town that is both a farming community and a lake summer resort.

This is a sequel to the author's schoolboy adventures in Fetched Up Yankee, which is temporarily out of print. This book describes the July fourth celebration, the county fair, love and life in the country, and trips to a nearby mill town that celebrated each week with a wild Saturday night.

The tedium of farm chores, sweating out Dog Days and harvesting the hay is broken by auctions, birthday parties, summer dances, and listening to the conversations of the elderly Yankees, French Canadians, Scots, and the professors from Ivy League Universities. The hard farm life contrasted with the seemingly leisurely life of the thousands of vacationers who descend on the town each summer and thoroughly change it. Sorting out all the confusing mores is an exciting challenge to a native country boy.

It is a record of a fascinating, bygone time, a period that has been mostly forgotten, and a era that will never return. Like Margaret Mitchell's South, it is Gone With the Wind.