Jun 4, 2013
Celebrated rural historian and author Jerry Apps shared stories from his newest and most personal book “Limping through Life: A Farm Boy’s Polio Memoir.” Jerry was hard-working 12-year-old farm kid when he contracted polio one winter. Though the disease crippled part of his body, Apps shared how polio strengthened him as well, fortifying his attitudes toward hard work and rural living, and setting him on the path to becoming a writer. Apps also shared some history of the polio epidemic in Wisconsin, which hit the Fox River Valley where Jerry lived particularly hard after World War II.