Editor’s Note: Over the next few weeks we would like to introduce our readers to the correspondents who faithfully write town news each week.

Wally Ritz, a native of Germany, has been in the United States for almost 50 years. “I love both countries with all my heart,” she said. “Some ideologies or ways of thinking are different.” (A. Aloisio) Alison Aloisio

When the Citizen’s East Bethel columnist Wally Ritz first came to Bethel from Massachusetts almost 40 years ago, she brought her Germany-based job with her – in any early version of working remotely.

But instead of a computer, a cellphone and WiFi, Ritz relied on a landline telephone and a fax machine.

A native of Germany, Ritz was working for a friend who sold specialty hardware for aircraft in Germany, made in the United States. Ritz’s job was to handle buying, shipping and exporting, and bookkeeping.

“I was the branch office in East Bethel,” she said. “I was on the phone all the time. And I’d wake up in the morning and find a pile of faxes all over my floor.”

With a six-hour time difference between the countries, the German office had been hard at work faxing to Ritz long before she awoke.
For a time, the arrangement prompted speculation among some of her East Bethel neighbors as to what kind of work she did that caused her car to be in her driveway all day.

The conclusion, Ritz said with a laugh: “She’s a drug dealer.”

Ritz has lived in the United States for almost 50 years, becoming a citizen in 1988.

She grew up in Linkenheim, Germany, near the Black Forest. Her father had been a master gardener, but after World War II, she said, “No one could make a living at that.” So he went into construction for a time, and then as he got older he switched to working for an atomic reactor research center, in the area of decontamination.

Growing up in the small town, Ritz remembers in her teen years in the 1960s and 70s helping to organize gatherings of her peers to discuss current topics. She also worked as a summer camp counselor in Austria.

In 1975, after meeting and falling in love with an American Army veteran who had stayed on in the country after being stationed there, she came to the U.S. with him. They married and lived in Massachusetts, and had two daughters.

After she had lived there a decade, her marriage ended. She then worked for a time as an auto parts delivery driver.

Because she had become proficient in English, her German friend who had just started his hardware company asked her to go to New York with him to sit in and listen at a meeting. That’s how she ended up working for him.

In trying to make ends meet, Ritz began looking for a more affordable place for her and her daughters to live.

“Someone I knew in Denmark (Maine) suggested I come to Maine because it was cheaper,” she said.

She looked in the Boston Globe newspaper for real estate rentals, and found a reasonably priced one on the Intervale Road in East Bethel. She would later buy the house.

A few years after coming to Bethel, Ritz married again, and beginning in the early 1990s did office work for her husband’s business. She also had another child, a son.

In the late 1990s, when a proposal for a gas pipeline would bring the line close to her house, she became involved in an opposition effort.

“We didn’t win, but we got a thicker pipe,” she said, as an added safety measure.

In 2008 Ritz’s second marriage ended and she worked in housekeeping for a time. She sold her house in 2013 and returned to Germany for a while, where she developed heart trouble and needed extended care.

But she was eventually able to return to Bethel, where she worked in a consignment shop at the Holidae House, staying until 2015.
A couple years later Ritz moved to the Bethel House on Main Street, where she lives today.

She helps out other residents there by organizing food deliveries from the monthly public supper at the Bethel Alliance Church, for those who cannot attend. She also arranges for monthly food deliveries as part of the Senior Farmshare program, allowing the residents to get fresh vegetables during harvest season.

Ritz also collects returnable bottles and cans to be donated toward Telstar’s North Star program in Bryant Pond, and she helps at the monthly Soup’s On lunch at the Methodist Church.

When she’s not doing those things, Ritz enjoys reading and gardening. Crocheting was a favorite pasttime until hand discomfort limited her.

Her biggest joy these days are her grandchildren, who range in age from 5 to 26, and a brand-new great-granddaughter.

“The little ones are fun,” she said.

And, of course, there’s the Citizen column, which she has been writing for a decade.

People contact her via emails, texts and some calls, she said. In the past for fun, she included a weekly trivia question in the column, and held mock elections through the column for mayor and governor of East Bethel.

The most unusual column contact?

“I got a call for a date once,” she said.