Daily Clarion Sports Editor Pete Swanson retired this month from the Princeton newspaper, capping off a career of nearly 60 years in the news business.
Swanson, known in the newsroom for his puns, unrivaled work ethic and atrocious penmanship, has written hundreds of thousands of inches of copy about local sports, people and the community.
The native of Arlington Heights, Illinois, studied journalism at the University of Illinois and covered high school sports part-time for both the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette and the Champaign-Urbana Courier in the late 1950s.
Swanson graduated in January 1961, working as a police reporter apprentice in a Chicago news bureau for a few months before getting his first full-time sports reporting job.
He was a newspaper sports writer in Evansville for 21 years prior to joining The Daily Clarion staff as sports editor in 1989. Swanson worked at the Daily Clarion nearly 13 years without missing a day before a health problem required sick time. He originally retired in 2006 but returned in less than two years.
– Daily Clarion (Princeton)
