Jack Schwartz, Key Cog at New York Newspapers, Dies at 82

Mr. Schwartz’s wife, Dr. Nella Shapiro, said he died of complications of Covid-19 at a hospital in the Bronx. He was 82 and lived in Chappaqua, N.Y.

Mr. Schwartz credited Stan Asimov, a Newsday editor and mentor known as Azzy, with imparting a defining lesson.

“From Azzy,” he wrote in his memoir, “I learned to absorb abuse from above without inflicting it on those below.”

Jacob David Schwartz was born on May 9, 1938, in the Bronx to Isadore and Pauline (Bonnick) Schwartz. His father was a produce manager, his mother a homemaker.

As a student at City College of New York, Mr. Schwartz worked on The Campus, the college newspaper. One of its editors at the time was Edward Kosner, who would go on to edit Newsweek, New York and Esquire magazines and The Daily News.

“He would have been a favorite professor of literature at any college,” Mr. Kosner said of Mr. Schwartz in an email, “but he caught a chronic case of journalism those first days on The Campus, and he never recovered.”

A high point of Mr. Schwartz’s time with The Campus came in 1956, when he wrote an article about a fellow student, Herb Stempel, who was a contestant on the NBC quiz show “Twenty-One.” The article conveyed the slightest suggestion that not everything on the show was as it seemed. NBC went ballistic, demanding a retraction. Soon after, the show was indeed revealed to be fixed, with Mr. Stempel the main whistle-blower.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/19/nyregion/jack-schwartz-dead-coronavirus.html