Before he met the beautiful Concetta, Lou had resigned himself to working in, and eventually dying in, the coal mine, just as his father before him had done. He was uneducated, he aspired to nothing higher, and his future looked about as bleak as the company-owned coal-town where he'd grown up, Standard, Illinois. Then chance stepped in, and smiled upon Lou, through provision of an unlikely meeting between this coal-town scruff and a genteel city-girl...