Overview

James Ure's remembrance of his father's childhood is as vivid as Stephen King's Stand by Me, conjuring for readers another time and place--one that will be familiar to older readers with a memory of the polio pandemic and of interest to a younger generation because Ure writes with such honesty. Despite being raised a Mormon, James's namesake father Jimmy took to smoking, drinking, and swearing at an early age. An even greater break with his culture was his interest in reading everything in sight at the local library, a young person's entry into a world beyond the limits of Depression-era Utah. As the firstborn son of a voluble and controlling father, Jimmy was diagnosed with polio as a child, one of thirty million victims worldwide, but he could never forgive the Mormon elders for promising him a recovery that never came. As with many polio victims, the affliction returned to plague him as he aged. James learned the details of these experiences in his father's outpourings. Puzzling over why fate created such dramatic mood swings in a man so dear to him, he decided to write his father's story and determine how polio shaped his own life.

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9781560852230

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James W. Ure is the award-winning author of Hawks and Roses and Bait for Trout: Being the Confessions of an Unorthodox Angler. With Stephanie Ure, he helped write Hawk Lady. He is a former reporter at the Salt Lake Tribune, publicist and director of the Sundance Film Festival, animal handler for the Walt Disney Company, and owner of Jim Ure Company Advertising and Marketing. As a journalist, he saw his articles and essays published nationally and was honored with the William Randolph Hearst National Writing Fellowship. With a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Ure completed Leaving the Fold: Candid Conversations with Inactive Mormons. He is now writing a work of fiction, Laughing Trout: A Novel of Fly Fishing in a Mad, Mad World of Love and Utter Pandemonium. Polio Boys was an honorable mention winner in the memoir category of the Utah Arts Council's annual writing competition.

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