About — Linda Fritz

About Linda

Before beginning work on her uncle's memoir-biography over a decade ago, Linda was the editor of The Delmarva Review, a literary journal published on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

Linda has published articles in a variety of East and West Coast magazines and newspapers. Her piece, “Remembering Martin –Joan Baez Creates Legendary Magic,” published by the Tidewater Times, won a Clarion Award for creative nonfiction from the Association of Women in Communication in 2009.

Early in her career she was an assistant editor for Sunset and the associate editor for Diversion magazine. Linda also traveled the U.S. extensively as a marketing researcher and management consultant before marrying and moving to a farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland where she and her husband raised three sons.

Linda began writing for local newspapers at the age of fourteen. During college, she was selected for a summer internship program sponsored by the American Society of Magazine Editors, interning for Rudder magazine in NYC and Sunset magazine in Menlo Park, CA. She received a B. S. from Penn State University where she majored in consumer studies and journalism, including a ten-week program studying the British mass media, based at the University of Manchester in England.

Answering Alaska’s Call is her first book.

and the beginnings of this book …

There’s no need to announce you’re new at this. If I’d done that, my first surgery patient would have wrapped himself in his sheet and gone screaming into the night. — Milo Fritz

These words were part of my first-day-on-the-job instructions when I was sixteen. I did my best to follow my uncle’s directive that day in June, 1966—even writing it down afterwards—and it has served me well ever since.

I had been invited by my Uncle Milo and Aunt Betsy to live, work and travel with them in Alaska that summer, working as a nurse’s assistant in Dr. Fritz’s Anchorage-based eye, ear, nose, and throat medical practice. I was prescient enough to appreciate that working for ‘Doc’ Fritz, as he was known throughout Alaska, would be a summer like no other, so I kept a daily journal documenting my experiences.

Anchorage Remembers anthology — Highlights from that summer form the basis of “True Pioneer,” an essay that was included in Anchorage Remembers, published in 2015 as part of Anchorage’s centennial celebration. The essay was a prelude to my memoir/biography of ‘Doc’ Fritz, a man whose life story—as a pioneering physician, World Wasr II hero, bush pilot, and state legislator—is intertwined with Alaska history.