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“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. The award-winning
newsman tells why he never aggressively tried to discover who his
parents were. He tells of his questions about his father and mother
and describes a midwestern 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 had a deserved reputation for violence. There is brutality
in the book. There is also humor, madness and mischief.
The book is a journey which leads to an understanding of what he
owes the couple who raised him and the mother, said to be a sister
of two priests, who gave him up.
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 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.
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.
It is critical of some practices of newspapers today and offers
ideas of how they can be made more readable.
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