I NEVER LOOKED FOR MY MOTHER And Other Regrets of a Journalist Book

"I was born a bastard and I?ve been one all my life. I became a journalist." So begins Joseph P. Ritz?s story of his search for his background and his career as a journalist and playwright. In a 40-year career, Ritz worked for six daily newspapers. Most of those years was spent at the Buffalo Courier-Express and The Buffalo News. He tells stories about reporters and editors at those papers and the end of The Courier. The title of the book comes from a journey he makes discovering what he owes the troubled man and woman who raised him and what he owes the mother who gave him birth. He describes a Catholic childhood with a foster mother who disguised her voice when she answered the telephone because she believed callers thought she has secrets and a volatile foster father who occasionally threatened suicide and other violent acts. The book tells of family funerals at which mourners debated whether police were justified in shooting the deceased and the son of the man in the coffin arrived with a prison guard. There is brutality in the book. There is also humor, madness and mischief. It also describes the failures and frustrations of a daily newspaper reporter and his impressions of some of the famous people he encountered such as Harry S Truman, Richard Nixon and Martin Luther King. It tells of interviewing a multiple murderer and the agony of questioning ordinary men and women who are in the news because of a terrible misfortune such as killing their child. It describes days spent with a mob-connected news source hiding from his associates in Costa Nostra and using a ruse to enter the home of a Mafia godfather. This is the first book from Ritz since the mid-1960s when The Despised Poor (Beacon Press) received favorable reviews in The New York Times and several national magazines. In recent years he has returned to play writing. His play Trappists is published in an anthology entitled, Award Winning Plays from the Stage and Screen Book Club. He is one of the writers of a series of articles entitled The Road to Integration which won a Pulitzer Prize.Read More