There was no mistaking "Sandy" Schwartz when he strode into a room.
He stood well over 6 feet tall.
But that was not the reason for trepidation most of us felt when the publisher of the Daily Times walked into the newsroom in his trademark khaki pants and blue Oxford shirt.
We knew where he was headed.
Schwartz was an anomaly among newspaper publishers. He remains the only publisher I've ever worked for whose background was in news. He was an award-winning reporter and editor long before he moved into the business office.
Schwartz kept his own bulletin board in the newsroom, and every afternoon he would stride into the room, marked-up newspapers in hand, go to that bulletin board and post his critique for everyone to see.
He would mention the things he liked - and those he thought were off the mark. Mistakes were usually highlighted in red marker.
And God forbid we violated one of his basic Daily Times tenets. In those days, Sandy insisted that our two lead local facing pages - Pages 4 and 5- display no less than 20 items. That would mean a combination of briefs from across the county, stories and photos.
I can't tell you the last time the newspaper featured that many items on those two pages. Hell, today we're lucky to have that many local items in the whole damn paper.
We got word this week that H.L. Schwartz III died. He was 83.
To almost anyone who knew him, he wasn't H.L. He was just Sandy.
I actually met him before I arrived at the Daily Times.
Sandy and his wife, Sara Cavanagh, founded and ran the influential horse publication, The Horse of Delaware Valley. In those days, the paper was 'pasted up,' as we say in the newspaper business, and printed at The Record newspaper in Coatesville, another property in the Journal Register Co. newspaper group in the region.
That was where I first saw the care and attention to detail that was Sandy's hallmark. He would carefully examine each page before it went to the press.
It's amazing the things you can learn in an obituary.
While I knew that Sandy started in the business as a reporter for the Associated Press, I didn't know he authored one of the first big scoops in the Watergate story, that being that one of the men arrested in the Watergate burglary was actually James McCord, a key aide in President Nixon's re-election big.
Sandy worked in Detroit, directing AP's coverage of the riots that rocked the city in the '60s.
Eventually he would become a publisher.
In Primos, our beloved home for decades, he led the wildly successful transition of the Delaware County Daily Times from a staid broadsheet to a no-holds-barred morning tabloid, with full coverage of Philadelphia pro sports.
They kicked off the promotion by cutting the newsstand price of the paper to 10 cents, thus giving us our nickname - "The Dime Times."
Of course we got called lots of other things for our treatment of some stories.
Sandy moved on to other Journal Register newspapers, leading The Mercury in Pottstown, The Trentonian in Trenton, and the Contra Costa Times in California.
Sandy never blinked in defense of his newsroom and our pursuit of a story.
I think that may be the thing I admired most about the man. He knew news - and he didn't suffer fools.
Actually, I think I'll just be forever grateful that he rescued me from Coatesville, where, like many outposts in the newspaper world, you worked about 1,000 hours a week for not a lot of money.
In those days, after you interviewed with Managing Editor Linda DeMeglio and Editor Stu Rose, you also had to interview with Sandy.
I wondered if he would recognize me from our meetings in Coatesville.
He knew me immediately.
Sandy Schwartz always knew what he wanted in a newspaper - and the people he hired to work in his newsrooms.
And make no mistake, it was his newsroom.
It was a different time, a different industry.
The business has changed so much.
I'm not sure Sandy could work in the newspaper environment today.
And we are all lesser for that.
RIP, Sandy Schwartz. He wasn't just a publisher. He was a newsman.
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