ONE WAY TO WHITEFISH is a mid-century Manhattan coming-of-age story set in the immigrant neighborhood of Yorkville on the upper East Side. Don is a typical American kid. He likes liverwurst and onion sandwiches, exploring Central Park with his best friend Allison, watching people on the Third Avenue El go by his apartment, and drawing with his favorite pencils. His mother Velma runs a bar in the neighborhood, where the regulars sometimes pay too much for their Rheingolds and say, "for the house." The narrative moves between Don's childhood in the early 1940s, and his journey in the late 1950s to the American west, when he travels across the country on a Greyhound bus to Whitefish, Montana.