Local newspaper columnist found wonder in daily life
For more than 50 years, John Switzer ’70 shared stories of nature, family and small joys that kept readers coming back.
John Switzer ’70 planned on becoming a veterinarian when he first came to Ohio State. “Then he took his first science class and quickly switched to journalism,” jokes his son, Mike Switzer.
Thousands of Columbus Dispatch readers would eventually benefit from this change of major, as Switzer began working as a reporter for the newspaper immediately after graduation. He remained at The Dispatch for more than five decades and eventually wrote a popular, daily weather column that wasn’t really about the weather. “He wanted to write about the things he was interested in—nature, history, gardening, bird watching, the outdoors,” Mike says.
Switzer, 84, died Oct. 7. He was a man of seemingly unlimited interests and wrote about his love of dill pickles, how to dry a wet basement, Colo the gorilla, growing his first-ever beard, the hatching of trumpeter swans, the joys of eating locally grown sweet corn and acclimating, naked and alone in the woods, when the weather turns cold.
“He connected with readers,” says Michael Curtin ’73, a retired editor and associate publisher of The Dispatch. “I never met anyone with a more homespun personality than John, and you could see his personality and interests every day in the paper. Nobody had a bigger impact in terms of people looking forward to reading his column. His writing was simple yet elegant.”
Switzer was born in the small town of Fostoria, Ohio, almost two hours north of Ohio State. The only thing more important to him than his readers was his family: his wife, Suzann, and their sons Mike, Tom and Tim ’11. “The unsung hero in this story is my mother,” Mike says. “Dad had some health issues the last several years, and she was an amazing caregiver and helped him stay in his home until the end, when he was surrounded by his family.”
After writing about gazing at the stars, his brother-in-law’s run-in with a seagull, or how in the summer the “wheat is turning gold” and the “Queen Anne’s lace are beginning to line country roadways,” Switzer would end his “weather” columns with a one-sentence meteorological report. In his honor (and own words): “Today will be mostly sunny and mild, with a high of 52 and a low of 32.”
