Out of the blue they came to Shannon. Extraordinary people who would do extraordinary things in what was an extraordinary era when the combination of American know-how and enterprise, with Irish imagination and will to do well established a hotbed around Shannon Airport in which were planted the seeds of the Irish economic transformation of the 1960s. Recorded in outline in this book are the largely untold stories of a selection of those extraordinary Americans who collectively formed the key in opening up the deprived West of Ireland to new ideas, new confidence an a new future including Charlie Blair, Bernard P McDonagh, Stan Delaplane, Mark Edwin, Lavone Andrews, Barbara Walters and Chuck Feeney.