Bob “Schween” Schwerin worked quietly on the sports desk for decades, answering phones and calling coaches to compile statistics and scores from games. He logged them into the Post-Gazette’s record books, a resource for the thousands of high school sport stories written each season.
The former sports news assistant and Newspaper Guild member died on Tuesday, Aug. 1, in Adobe Care of Monroeville. The 80-year-old Squirrel Hill resident had lived there for the past few years, according to the Patrick T. Lanigan Funeral Home and Crematory in East Pittsburgh.
Randy Stoernell, who worked with him for many years on the PG sports copy desk, said, “He was intelligent, was always good with numbers, statistics and figures, and he always had great stories.”
The fact that he worked at the PG part time didn’t deter him from fitting in with the rest of the sports staff, retired PG sports reporter Marino Parascenzo recalled. “He was very good,” he said. “And there was that quiet sense of humor that warmed the office.”
The 1961 Taylor Allderdice High School graduate served with the U.S. Army Reserves from 1966 to 1971. Schween began his work at the PG in 1979 and continued until 2020.
Schween’s life may have been focused on sports — and he was a regular at Champs and the Murray Avenue Grill in Squirrel Hill — but he had a passion for arts and culture, too, traveling to New York City often to enjoy Broadway shows.
Steve Karlinchak, longtime PG librarian who is a theater fan himself, said every time Schween came back from a trip, he would leave anywhere between a half-dozen to a dozen Playbills on his desk.
“I think that I lived vicariously through him,” Karlinchak said. “When I would see him in person, he would give a complete rundown of all the plays he saw on Broadway and off-Broadway. If any of the plays or musicals that he saw were a revival of something he had seen previously, I got a compare and contrast between the two versions of the show.”
Schween’s other passion was books. The funeral home death notice noted that he had amassed a collection of over 900 hardbound books that spanned various genres and topics.
“He DID love books,” Stoernell said. “When he took breaks from work, he always would get a few pages in during his couple of minutes.”
The son of the late Ernest and Adrienne Sedler Schwerin, he was devoted to his mother. “Every Sunday he would go to her place either to cook or bring her dinner and spend time with her,” Stoernell said. “He used to turn down invitations to other events on occasion to fulfill that obligation.”
Friends will be received on Monday from 3-8 p.m. at the Patrick T. Lanigan Funeral
Home and Crematory Inc., 700 Linden Ave. at Cable Avenue, East
Pittsburgh. A prayer service will be held there at 7:30 p.m.
In lieu of flowers, memorial donations may be made in Schween’s memory to
Carnegie Library Oakland, www.carnegielibrary.org/give, or
to the Alzheimer’s Association Greater Pennsylvania, 2835 E. Carson St., Suite
200, Pittsburgh, PA 15203.
Helen is a copy editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but she's currently on strike. Contact her at hfallon@unionprogress.com.