James Edward McGrory (1904-82) is a Celtic legend, remembered today as the greatest goal-scorer in the history of Scottish football. His record of five hundred and fifty goals in his fifteen-year career at Parkhead from 1922 to 1937 is unlikely to be surpassed and will stand forever as a memorial to a player who was a typical product of the period between the two world wars. At a depressing time when wages were low and work was scarce, his feats on the field provided a welcome and much-needed escape for the thousands of ordinary, cloth-capped Scottish working men who packed the dirt terracing to cheer on every move he made. Jimmy McGrory was more than a professional footballer; he was a beacon who lit up so many winter Saturdays for so many people in an age when football was the simple pastime of the masses and not the boardroom hobby of foreign billionaires. When McGrory started his career more than 80 years ago, the world was a different place and football had a different meaning. It was not yet the tool of corporate interests, and local clubs still attracted local players and local supporters. Loyalties were unquestioned and fathers passed on to sons their love of the game and their love of the club. Every Glasgow boy grew up playing in the street knowing that eventually he might graduate to grass and join that pantheon of the gods he considered the team he supported to be. Few attained their dream, but Jimmy McGrory did - giving much of his life to the one club he supported as a boy and served as an adult till his death. Heroes are Forever tells the full story of McGrory's life and career, and is set against the vividly drawn background of the inter-war period. It is a portrait of a loyal, modest and inspirational man who lifted the hearts of his countrymen and raised the spirits of a nation. It was he, after all, who by scoring twice for Scotland in 1933 provoked the original 'Hampden Roar'.