About Max 

I was born in 1929, five months before the crash, so I was a child of the Great Depression. I remember what I was doing when I got word that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. I played one summer of professional baseball for the St. Louis Browns organization before graduating from college in time for the Korean War where I served as a line officer on a destroyer, the U.S.S. John R. Craig. I returned from the Far East in 1956 with a half-Chinese wife I met and married in Hong Kong. 

Liddy and me had three children while I was in graduate school at Auburn University in an atmosphere flavored by the Montgomery bus boycott and the march on Selma. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (where a fourth child was born), I became an academician, serving on the faculty of Auburn University, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and, for 22 years, at the Pennsylvania State University, first at the Hershey Medical Center, then at the main campus at University Park. After retiring from Penn State in 1991, I worked for almost three years at the Center for Tropical Agriculture in Turrialba, Costa Rica, where I had the great satisfaction of directing research that led to publication of a genetic linkage map for the cocoa plant, Theobroma cacao.

The writer Max Blue was born sometime in the early 1980s when I wrote a short story about fishing that won a prize at the Harrisburg Manuscript Club. At the time I was still publishing scientific work so I felt the need for a pen name.


In addition to a large number of unpublished short stories (coming soon as a series of e-books), Max has published the following books: 


  • 2012 - Philadelphia Baseball
  • 2011 Philadelphia's Phillies: Baseball Thrills in Three Centuries
  • 2009 - Shorty Spooner 
  • 2009 - Phillies Journal 1888-2008 
  • 2008 - Cold Front Passing Hokkaido 
  • 2004 - Times - A screenplay with the same title has been written. 
  • 2003 - Luz Stella's Tale (with Wilson Abut) - A screenplay with the same title has been written. 
  • 2003 - For Those In Peril On The Sea - One of 22 finalists from 433 submissions in the 2001 James Jones Literary Society first novel competition. 
  • 2001 - Cielito Lindo (with Wilson Abut) 
  • 2001 - Murder at the CAT  
  • 2001 - God Is Alive and Playing Third Base for the Appleton Papermakers - a collection of baseball stories. 
  • 2001 - Higher Ed - Finalist in the Ulysses Award competition for superior fiction sponsored by the Independent Literature Institute. 

Scientific career of Paul Fritz in the field of Biochemistry and Plant Molecular Genetics:


  1. 1962 - Ph.D. in Biochemistry, Auburn University
  2. 1962 - 1964 -U.S. Public Health Service Post-Doctoral Fellow, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
  3. 1964 - 1966 -Assistant Professor of Pharmacology, Auburn University
  4. 1966 - 1969 - Associate Professor of Molecular Biology, University of Alabama at Birmingham Medical Center
  5. 1969 - 1986 - Associate Professor of Pharmacology, Pennsylvania State University Medical Center, Hershey, PA.
  6. 1986 - 1991 - Associate Professor of Food Science, Penn State University, University Park, PA.
  7. 1992 - 1995 - Associate Professor of Plant Genetics, Center for Tropical Agriculture, Turrialba, Costa Rica
  8. Students mentored: 2 Masters; 7 PhDs;  10 Post-Doctoral Fellows
  9. More than 60 peer-reviewed publications
  10. New Tools For 21st Century Plant Breeding - DNA markers: Theory and Applications with Examples from Research on the Chocolate Tree Theobroma cacao. CATIE, Turrialba, Costa Rica, 1995 (ISBN 9977-57-204-6)

headshot
headshot
+

Max Blue

Author
Scientist
Baseball historian