Oshkosh: Looking Back


Book Description

The book examines the history of sports in Oshkosh. It includes stories of basketball, baseball, football, bowling and golf and by those who played the game. It is also about the past, a time slowly receding in our memories. The story of the Oshkosh All Stars is the featured story. It was our own professional basketball team that brought home the World Professional Basketball Championship in 1942. It’s also a story of Lonnie Darling and its featured player, Leroy “Lefty” Edwards. Edwards was considered the best player of his time and helped carry the name of Oshkosh throughout the country. There other story lines as well. Oshkosh has a long history of amateur and professional baseball and those stories are an integral part of the book as is the city’s bowling history and three of its finest performers. The current controversy over the land usage on the city’s municipal golf course sold recently to the Oshkosh Truck Corporation leads to a number of stories about the history of the Lakeshore Golf Course and the impact it has had on many who played there. Oshkosh is not Green Bay but has its own football story. The book features the Oshkosh Comets and four from our city who played for the Green Bay Packers. A book on the history of Oshkosh sports would be incomplete without including two resident Olympians. Their stories, unknown to many, are told here.




Flying Magazine


Book Description




Other Waters


Book Description

The places we fish and people we are with takes us on new adventures in Mike Yurk’s latest book, Other Waters. Follow Mike as he takes you from Costa Rico to catch marlin, to Mexico for sailfish and big bass to Canada’s Northwest Territories fishing for giant lake trout. In between are other waters; streams, rivers, ponds and lakes both big and small forming memorable fishing with unforgettable companions. There are two trout streams in northern Wisconsin from Mike’s youth to years later two other steams in North Carolina’s Appalachian Mountains. Rivers such as Wisconsin’s Wolf and Fox Rivers fishing in his early years with his father and grandfather brings us to the Mississippi River today fishing with buddies near his home in northwestern Wisconsin. Another river in Missouri takes us on legendary float fishing one of Ozarks premier waters. Go trout fishing in a military training area in Germany where the weather is always challenging. Two small ponds in Alabama as well as a large impoundment lake teaches Mike about bass fishing. Join Mike during the winter when he fishes through the ice on several Wisconsin lakes. Another Wisconsin lake never disappoints with both muskies and bass. There are other waters close to his home, fishing for smallmouth bass in Lake Superior, walleyes in northern Minnesota and largemouth bass and panfish at a lake known simply as Lake X to protect its identity. Exploring other waters bring both successes and disappointments along with new sights and sounds. As important as the waters Mike fishes are those who join him on these travels and ventures along with the people he meets while fishing other waters. Other Waters is book of people and places and adventures and fishing, making a lifetime of memories.




Flying Magazine


Book Description




Flying Magazine


Book Description




The Dark Lake


Book Description

Important: Repressed memories are sometimes worse than the truth. Jane is well into her thirties and still living with her parents in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in a dependent condition, like a teenager. She would love to move out and live on her own as an adult. But she can't keep a job or take on any responsibility that would allow her to be independent. Jane just wants to be a normal person. Years of alcohol and drugs may be the cause of her disabled state, but there could be something more. Her therapist, Miriam, thinks the key to Jane's troubled mind lies in a disturbing dream Jane keeps having. Miriam encourages her to talk about the dream, but Jane fights her therapist, and tries to avoid painful subjects or memories. Then one night, while attending a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, Jane sees a picture in the local newspaper of her little blue Chevette being dragged from the bottom of the lake. But that car went in the lake twenty years ago. From the shadowy dread, a frightening picture begins to emerge. This is a work of fiction inspired by actual events.




Flying Magazine


Book Description




Flying Magazine


Book Description




Boulder Blues: A Tale of the Colorado Counterculture


Book Description

Boulder Blues brings you back to the era of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. Its madness is exposed in a naive twist of two musicians from Irish immigrant backgrounds who struggle through the nightmare of a political war and countrywide civil unrest as they try to make sense of a world beyond the American Dream of their parents and grandparents. Sweet, poignant, laughable and pithy, it catches a time once labeled as a 'Modern Renaissance'.




Looking Back


Book Description

I started this project about a year ago, with the intent to show some of my life experiences of fifty-five years to whoever decides to read this book. I started out as a very naive, innocent fourteen-year-old boy not knowing what life held in store for me. I never finished my second year of high school as my father passed away and being the only male in our family (I have three great sisters), decided to help run our family business. Along the way, left to deal with some situations I sometimes wondered if I could cope with, it all has helped me to become a better person. If the Lord is willing, and there is interest in this writing, I plan on a sequel about some of the most interesting characters and wonderful people I encountered along my path in life . . .