Plot

A "high flying" surgeon learns a few valuable life lessons at the hands of a beautiful nurse.

Young Jim Stanton is a conscientious surgeon, but spends too many off-duty hours pursuing his passion for aviation to suit his stuffy father. When it is discovered that a passenger killed in a plane that Jim crashes was a married woman, the resulting scandal prompts the hospital to put Jim on probation. His pride wounded, Jim takes to the open road and enjoys the simpler life of a vagabond. In Los Angeles--where he is arrested for vagrancy and put to work on a road crew--Jim runs into old pal Dick Miller, who gets him a job as a mechanic for Roberts Aviation. But maintaining his anonymity becomes more difficult, particularly when a pretty nurse, Doris King, decides to make Jim's redemption her personal crusade.—Chris Stone <jstone@bellatlantic.net>

The latest in a long line in his family in the profession, young Jim Stanton is a talented and committed Park Avenue surgeon with a promising practice, he convinced by his father of it being a noble profession filled with noble people, he in turn treating his work with respect. When Jim is caught up in a scandal coming out of misconceptions of the truth, the profession, the other doctors who seem to care more about perception, not only turns its back on him in the medical board of the hospital where he operates placing him on probation, but so does his father and his socialite fiancée, Barbara Reed. With no one to support but himself and not wanting anything from this medical life, Jim decides to start life anew, thumbing for rides and riding the rails while keeping company with vagrants with no set destination or set idea of how he will earn a living. By chance, Jim has an encounter with an old friend, pilot Dick Miller, who knows of Jim's situation with his medical practice, who taught Jim how to fly, and who knows he can get Jim a job at Roberts Airlines in Los Angeles as a mechanic, the company where he himself works. Jim accepts the offer on the caveat that Dick not divulge to anyone his former life as a doctor, they settling on the assumed name of Jim Jones instead of Jim Stanton, which carries some notoriety. While Jim does not want to make any human connections while he continues to figure out his life, Doris King, who works out of the airport as a nurse in the ambulance air corps, can see something in Jim more than just a mechanic. As Doris starts to fall for Jim, she becomes all the more determined to discover what he has not told about his past life to bring him back truly to what he was meant to do with his life.—Huggo