By Mallory Wyman
October 14, 2009
[Listen to audio of Howard Schwach half-way into article.]
Editor Howard Schwach can generally be found burrowed into his corner desk, a one-man museum of history exhibiting family photos, years of old press passes, and several well known manifestos including the priority rules saying, ‘if it bleeds, it leads,’ printed on old crinkled newspaper.
It’s Thursday, publication deadline day for The Wave, a small weekly in Rockaway, New York, that has been circulating since 1893 and still costs 35 cents an issue, but Schwach is already hard at work on next week’s edition. Always looking forward, he keeps a matrix of rotating columns and a checklist of articles to be written, which reporter is assigned to cover them, what page they will appear on, and whether or not there will be accompanying pictures.
The patriarch of this family, and the inhabitants of this small seaside storefront converted into a newsroom could never be considered anything but, Schwach keeps a medicine cabinet’s worth of supplies stocked in the upper cubby of his desk where the aspirin bottle mingles with the crushed red pepper on hand for the pizza often ordered for the staff.
A typical man of his age in many ways, he’ll tell anyone who will stand still long enough about the successes of his son, the cop, and his daughter, the assistant director of Central Synagogue in Manhattan, New York. His proud papa persona extends to the newsroom where he parades the upcoming front page to each of the staffers as soon as it comes off of the printer. His position has even garnered him some adulation from his two grandsons, “They think it’s pretty cool that I do the newspaper,” he says.
But Schwach, who recently turned 70, is not a typical man. After retiring from a long career as a history teacher and textbook author, he has turned his attention to newspaper writing and editing, fulfilling a childhood dream. “When I was young, I wanted to write a book, I wanted to write for a newspaper, and I wanted to kind of help the community out, and I think I did that,” he says.
Born in 1939, Schwach remembers being affected by newspapers early on. “I always perceived that newspapers were important,” he says. “When I was growing up, the New York Times was God… [and] you got your news from newspapers.”
He started out writing for his high school newspaper but admitted, “I wasn’t one of their stars.” College led to more writing opportunities when he transferred from NYU to the newly formed C.W. Post, he was able to be part of the staff that started the first newspaper at the brand new school. Early in his writing career at C.W. Post, he courted controversy. After he published an editorial on a cafeteria that was open only to dorm residents despite commuters making up the majority of the student body, the football team rallied and broke into the cafeteria doing a fair amount of damage to school property in the process. The administration blamed the article, causing the pot-stirring Schwach to narrowly avoid being kicked out of school.
[Listen below to audio of Howard Schwach talking about how he entered journalism.]
How I Became a Scribe
Schwach hasn't changed his ways and still comes under fire on occasion. In a letter to the editor, several members of a local middle school openly accused Schwach of “slandering” their school with “his unsubstantiated information.” While a more ego conscious editor might have tossed the letter out, Schwach published it, slander accusations and all, among other residents’ ruminations on animal hospitals and natural gas pipeline installations.
Following his graduation from college, Schwach completed a stint in the Navy as a court reporter on an aircraft carrier. He then returned home and became a teacher first in Rockaway and later in Brooklyn. The only extended period of time he spent away from Rockaway was the nine years he and his wife of 45 years, Susan, lived in Middletown, Connecticut. There, Schwach got a job writing easy-reader textbooks for junior-high and high school students.
Upon returning to his hometown, he spent 25 years teaching at IS-53 in Rockaway. He later became the Board of Education editor for the Special Education Curriculum Development Unit and wrote the city’s first Independent Education Plan (IEP) manual. “I kept my hand in writing,” Schwach said about the freelancing he was able to do outside of the classroom, selling children’s stories to Scholastic.
It wasn’t until the late 1980’s that Schwach became involved in The Wave. After becoming friends with Leon Locke, the late husband of current publisher Susan Locke, he began writing two columns, School Scope, and Short Takes, both of which focused on education in the area. In 2001, when Susan Locke took over following her husband’s passing, the then recently retired Schwach came on as editor. Susan Locke believes his roots in the community are a great asset. “He’s a fixture in the community. People know him so they call him up and tell him stories….He’s got a love of Rockaway…he has the history,” she said.
History certainly comes in handy for a local paper with a limited scope: Rockaway peninsula and nothing but Rockaway peninsula. “The issues in Rockaway never change,” Schwach says. “The people have changed and maybe the point has changed a bit but the stories are still the same. I like covering just one peninsula that I know very, very well.”
“He takes a lot of pride in the newspaper and it shows every week,” said staff reporter Nick Briano.
Though Schwach describes The Wave, “like a minor league ball club, for people on the way up and people on the way down,” he also says, “This is the perfect place for me.”
For the people on the way up, the teacher in Schwach will never go away. “[He] is willing to take the time out to teach us how to do our jobs the right way,” says Briano who sees Schwach sticking around for a long time. “I don’t think he will ever retire, he loves what he does too much,” he said.
Thinking about retirement isn’t on Schwach’s to-do list anytime soon. “I don’t want to,” he said, adding, “my mind hasn’t gone yet, I figure I got another 10 years.” But don’t expect him to end up like many famous ballplayers that “play one year longer than they should,” he said. “I’ll retire when I can’t do it anymore.”
Of course, for someone like Howard Schwach, retirement doesn’t necessarily mean slowing down. Though by his calculations, he expects to be 80 when he leaves The Wave; his post-retirement dream is to start an online newspaper dedicated to Rockaway, the community he loves.
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