Jerry Apps

Jerry Apps is a Wisconsin rural historian, memoirist, and professor emeritus whose books preserve the textures of farm life and regional experience. Limping through Life, published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press in 2013, carries the fuller subtitle A Farm Boy’s Polio Memoir. Apps recalls contracting polio at age twelve and traces how its lasting effects influenced his education, military service, family relationships, and eventual work as a writer. The memoir is personal but also historically grounded, placing one farm family’s experience within the broader fear surrounding the disease before vaccination became widely available. Apps gives particular attention to relatives, teachers, and friends who helped him adapt, making the book as much a record of community support as individual endurance. His wider nonfiction includes histories of Wisconsin barns, farming with horses, gardening, cheesemaking, and the Ringling enterprise. Limping through Life brings that documentary instinct inward, connecting a defining childhood illness to the professional path he later followed.