Janie Conway is a typical high school senior living in a typical small American town (Hortonville) facing the typical generation gap problems with her parents that her parents and their parents faced with their parents before her. That generation gap is more evident with her newspaper publisher father, Charles Conway, than her Red Cross volunteering mother, Lucille Conway. It is because of her father that Janie feels she has to sneak out of the house to attend a "blanket party" (i.e. a lawn party whose main purpose is for the couples to "smooch") with her unofficial steady, Scooper Nolan, and all their friends. Janie knows she's going to get in trouble with her father when Janie and Scooper's photograph from the party ends up on the cover of Life Magazine in a feature article. But those generation gap issues are raised a notch when the US Army decides to hold maneuvers in Hortonville, something against Charles' mentality in he foreseeing the fervor the young men imminently going off to war will raise on the young women of the town, i.e. Janie and her female friends. Indeed, the father-daughter dynamic between Charles and Janie is further tested with the soldiers' arrival. But what Janie didn't anticipate is that her unofficial steady relationship with Scooper would also be tested with the arrival into her life specifically of Pfc. Dick Lawrence.
—Huggo
