Penny Hale is the daughter of Jeff Hale, a once wealthy architect and widower now ruined by the depression and working as the maintenance man in an apartment building, in which his girlfriend Lola lives in the penthouse. Shirley, always positive and happy refuses to accept their drop in the world and believes prosperity is just around the corner. She makes friends with an eccentric, grumpy old man, Samuel G. Henshaw, who turns out to be a millionaire and backs her father's engineering plans.