Biographical information for Paul Fritz, pen name Max Blue. December 2008.
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. I returned from the Far East in 1956 with a Chinese wife I met and married in Hong Kong. Liddy and me had three children while I was in graduate school at Auburn, Alabama in an atmosphere flavored by the Montgomery bus boycott and the march from 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 State College main
campus. 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In addition to a large number of unpublished short stories, and a collection
of baseball stories published under the title God Is Alive and Playing Third Base for the Appleton Papermakers, the following
novels (all available from online booksellers) have been published:
2001 Higher Ed . . . Finalist in the Ulysses Award competition for
superior fiction sponsored by the Independent Literature Institute
2001 Giessows Cottage Farm . . . A screenplay entitled "The Adventures of
Jaybird and Crazy Dan" based on this novel has been written.
2001 Cielito Lindo (with Wilson Abut)
2001 Murder at the CAT
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.
2003 Luz Stella's Tale (with Wilson Abut) A screenplay with the same title
has been written.
2004 - Times
2008 - Cold Front Passing Hokkaido
2009 - Phillies
Journal 1888-2008
2009 - Shorty Spooner
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 US Public Health Service Post-doctoral Fellow , Oak Ridge Natl Laboratory
3.
1964 1966 Asst. Prof. of Pharmacology, Auburn University
4.
1966-1969 Assoc. Prof. of Molecular Biology, Univ. Alabama Birmingham Med Center
5.
1969- 1986 Assoc. Prof. of Pharmacology, Penn State Univ. Med Center, Hershey, Pa.
6.
1986-1991 Assoc. Prof. of Food Science, Penn State Univ. State College, Pa.
7.
1992- 1995 Assoc.Prof of Plant Genetics, Ctr for Tropical Agriculture, Turrialba, Costa Rica
8.
Students mentored . . . Masters 2; PhD. 7;
Post-doctoral - 10
9.
More than 60 peer-reviewed publications
10. Book NEW TOOLS FOR 21ST CENTURY PLANT BREEDING
DNA Markers:
