[4] Family life in his early years meant that "Marx and Lenin, strikes and demonstrations, were regular topics of dinner-table conversation", according to Eric Homberger of The Guardian, and that "his earliest political memory was, at the age of 14, the anguish he felt at the Stalin-Hitler pact;" the Pact was an agreement between Stalin and Hitler made in the last few weeks before the outbreak of war, leading Yurick to both fall out with his father, and to enlist in 1944 during World War II – where he trained as an Army surgical technician.
[4] It was here that he became familiar with children of welfare families, many of whom were "then called juvenile delinquents [...] Many of them belonged to fighting gangs...numbered in the hundreds; they were veritable armies.
In 1984, Yurick published a quite prescient and imaginative short story that considered how the use of a virtual, entirely imaginary island nation combined with advanced computer networking might be used to suck tremendous wealth from, and wreak havoc on, the global banking system.
Appearing in Datamation, a then-leading trade magazine focused on enterprise computing, "The King of Malaputa" (translation: bad whore) predates by at least 15 years Neal Stephenson's better-known novel, Cryptonomicon (1999) and its imaginary island nation, Kinakuta, which has been set up for use in anonymous, computer-based banking activities.
The story reflects Yurick's longstanding focus on banks and bankers as the source and agents of much power and trouble in the highly capitalized modern world.