About Robert M. Katzman - Don't Go Quietly Press

Why Read My Stories?

Because some people need a voice to scream their anguish, determination, frustration and independence.

Some people need to know that though life may knock them down again and again, though they may have

lost all that they own and see their future as only a black hopeless emptiness – that they are NOT alone.

The battle is not over until you say it’s over. Until you want to quit. It is not for other people to decide what
you are, who you are and what you are made of.

A person is so much more than where they live or work, what they wear or what they drive. A person is so
much more than stuff.

If the whole world says that you are nothing, and never will be anything, but your wife and children see you
as the rock of their lives – then you are just that: A Rock.

If the people closest to you – family, true friends – see the real you: your character, your love for them, the
good that lives in you – then all the other people’s words are just dust.

My books are not about triumph. They are about NOT accepting failure as your destiny. Don’t quit. Get up.
Start over. Believe in yourself.

It is the steel in your spine that matters most, not your paycheck or your lack of one.

I’ve lost one business after another, gone bankrupt, lost a home. I’ve often said I’m on the cutting edge
of obsolescence.

Every way of making a living I’ve ever tried was just about past its time… just as I was plunging into it:
Newspaper Stands – gone! Independent Bookstores – gone! Back issue magazine stores – gone!

I’ve had 42 operations – from foot surgery to brain surgery, twice – and I’m still here.

I still believe in me. I still have value. Someone still needs me. It’s still up to me when it’s over. And it’s still
up to you.

My stories are about overcoming oppression, fear, and striking back when the time came for me to strike
back. I have known love and true friendships; Loves lost and love found. Finding out that I had real grit and
was not just anyone’s pawn.

Despite all the pain and loss that have rained down on me much of my life, I can say I didn’t give in but stood
up for my principles. If God gave me the gift of being able to put one word next to another and end up with
sentences that say exactly what someone’s heart feels and wants and dreams of, then I have found the
reason for my life.

I’ve been inspired to regard every day as a gift. And I still believe in me. Do you still believe in you?

About Bob's Life

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 24 books. The first six books –
his autobiography – are available for purchase now, with more to follow.

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, when the desperate teen ran away from home. He established “Bob’s Newsstand” in a four-by-four-foot wooden shack at the corner of 51st Street and Lake Park Avenue. Then, accepted as a student at the prestigious University of Chicago Laboratory High School in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, he worked seven days a week 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. He fought a Chicago distribution giant for the right to compete, and broke the blockade placed on Gay magazines like Blue Boy to be distributed along with all the other mainstream 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, after six years, he won against his powerful opponent.

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 IL, and then his
Magazine Museum on Oakton Street in Skokie IL.

Cancer Patient

When he was just a year old, Katzman was given a massive dose of radiation at a Chicago hospital – an infamous mistake by a renowned, tragically misguided doctor that also harmed famed movie critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel 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 42 operations to date.

Love Story

Bob met Joyce Bishop — his Viking queen — at a dance on April 27, 1975. 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 found love again several years later, and married Nancy Alexander. The couple reside and create books together in Racine, Wisconsin.