Robert M. Katzman

Robert M. Katzman is a Chicago writer born in 1950 on the city’s South Side. His non-fiction stories sketch his tough and tender struggles through almost seven decades. He is the author of a two-volume autobiography, A Savage Heart and Fighting Words, published in 2018, and four previous books in his Fighting Words series.

Born to a talented, artistic, and mentally ill mother, he was beaten with fists, metal belt buckles, leather straps and rubber hoses until he was 14. Then, accepted as a student at the prestigious University of Chicago Laboratory High School in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, he ran away from home and established “Bob’s Newsstand” in a four-by-four-foot wooden shack at the corner of 51st Street and Lake Park Avenue in order to pay his tuition and living expenses. The business grew, eventually becoming a chain of five locations.

SERIAL ENTREPRENEUR

While some may be timid about starting small businesses, Katzman is tireless.

At age 19, he opened the Deli-Dali Delicatessen & Bakery, two hundred yards from his newsstand.

At age 24, he launched Gulliver’s Periodicals, Ltd., a newspaper and magazine distribution company via which he fought a Chicago distribution giant for the right of gay magazines like Blue Boy to be distributed along with all the other mass market publications. What Katzman saw as a basic civil rights principle turned into an antitrust suit and a protracted legal battle — but in the end, the blockade was broken and the LGBT magazines were distributed.

After the newsstands, Katzman moved on to bookstores — and moved his way north up the lakeshore. He ran his Grand Tour World Travel Bookstore on Clark Street in Chicago’s Lake View neighborhood, his vintage Magazine Memories and Poster Planet stores in a strip mall on Dempster Street in Morton Grove, and then his Magazine Museum on Oakton Street in Skokie.

CANCER PATIENT

When he was just a year old, Katzman was given a massive dose of radiation at a Chicago hospital — an infamous mistake like the one that also harmed movie critic Roger Ebert in childhood. At age 18, cancer was discovered in Katzman’s salivary gland. Doctors cut away part of his jawbone, and later replaced it with one of his ribs. Bob has endured 39 operations to date.

GREATEST LOVE STORY

Bob met Joyce Bishop — his Viking queen and the love of his life — at a dance on April 27, 1975, and within a month she had convinced her reluctant boyfriend that he was her guy, period. They had three children (she lovingly cared for a daughter from his first marriage) and 16 years later, they adopted another child, now 21.

“Through prosperity, bankruptcy, having no money and traveling for weeks in Europe, she was the essential woman in my life,” Katzman writes.“Silently enduring me when necessary. Endessly loving me, all those years. God bless her.”

Joyce Esther Bishop Katzman died from cancer on Mother’s Day, 2017. Her ashes rest in Iceland and Israel.

Robert M. Katzman resides and writes in Racine, Wisconsin. He blogs at DifferentSlants.com.