Sal's Site
I wrote this story about the now-deceased Bob Swisher, formerly of Urbana, Illinois, when I was in graduate school in 2016. He was an open and talkative guy who told me a lot about his life, even the dark parts.
An avid hunter and seller of antiques for more than four decades, 84-year-old Bob Swisher no longer buys anything he can’t lift. He also no longer strips and refinishes furniture. Yet like his great old finds in still another store, Swisher is durable; he understands what personal restoration means.
It’s a cloudless, chilly April morning, and Swisher browses the widely spaced aisles of Witchhazel Antiques in St. Joseph, Illinois, one of his favorite antique shops in the area. He is a bit under six-foot with thin white hair and sideburns, a reddish face, light green eyes, and the typical wrinkles one would expect to see on a man his age. When viewed from the side or in certain lighting, Swisher resembles former University of Illinois basketball coach Lou Henson, perhaps fitting for a man who once drew the Chief Illiniwek logo for the UI Grants-in-Aid office.
Charles Lumsdon, the amiable owner of Witchhazel who will be 69 in November but doesn’t look a day over 50, approaches to say hello as country music plays in the background. “So, are you just out browsing around, Bob?”
“Yeah, Charlie. We’re going to lead off Saturday’s column with your going out of business thing. It’s just kind of a potpourri of subjects next Saturday.”
“Good, I appreciate it.”
The “column” Swisher refers to is his own, the one he has contributed to The News-Gazette for more than 19 years. In it, he writes about the world of antiquing in the area and beyond. Swisher includes personal information (he has an addictive personality), past ventures (he was once a co-op owner of Vintage Antiques in downtown Champaign), and his involvement with the Preservation and Conservation Association of Champaign County (since the early 1980s).
In his upcoming column, Swisher will write about the staggered-out closing process of Witchhazel. For his part, Lumsdon is unfazed by the next phase of his life; he’s ready for retirement and mentions there is “a lot of art and bigger stuff” in a separate area of the store.
Taking his time, Swisher makes his way to that section of Witchhazel.
In his early 40s, Swisher rented a 3,600 square-foot storage space in Champaign that would eventually become packed with two decades worth of antiques he collected: depression glass, stained glass, a glass table, a wall bed, furniture, file cabinets, artifacts, brackets, and collectibles. Working with his second wife, Betty, he once priced this stuff to sell and earned nearly $25,000 to pay for a living room addition to his Urbana home.
But in the late 1960s, owning so many things for fun would have been unfathomable to Swisher. At a crisis point of his life, he remembers standing at a Chicago airport with a mere suitcase that held his meager traveling possessions. Jaundiced and undernourished, Swisher was heading to California to get sober. A further month of sporadic drinking would take place out west before he delved into Alcoholics Anonymous meetings with the same abandon he guzzled his drinks of choice, gin and Griesedieck Bros. beer.
Swisher started as a social drinker and says he and first wife, Carol, were a popular couple in town who enjoyed going to parties. As time went on, his swinging days in C-U took a troubling turn. “Swish,” as people sometimes call him, was a carouser who began to frequent taverns like Bunny’s and the Esquire Lounge too often for his own good.
Nonetheless, Swisher worked hard when he wasn’t drinking. After a four-year stint in the navy in the early 1950s, a time when he experimented with marijuana and opium in Cuba, he climbed his way up in the commercial arts field (now known as graphic design) with jobs at Our Wonderful World Encyclopedia and Channel 3. A hard-nosed guy in his 30s, Swisher was respected as a talented artist and designer. He eventually started his own commercial arts business called the Swish Shop and doubled his salary thanks to accounts with the Assembly Hall, Lincoln Square, and other prominent businesses. Swisher now had more money in the bank to get rip-roaring drunk with.
Homer resident Kenneth Jones, now 77 and retired, got his start in the commercial arts field at the Swish Shop and says Swisher was a tremendous teacher. He relates the past problems of his early mentor with care in his voice: “Bob’s always had a heart of gold, but he always came across as a bear, and he drank quite a bit back then.”
Swisher’s first big scare came when he saw blood in his urine in the bathroom of the Tea Garden restaurant, where his alcoholic dad was a manager. “I remember looking in the mirror and crying,” he says in his gravelly voice.
A few nights later he was drinking and bowling with a friend. The friend noticed blood coming out of Swisher’s ear and asked him what was wrong. Not long after this occurrence, Swisher’s doctor, a good-humored Jewish man who told off-color jokes and possessed a fine bedside manner, told his hard-drinking patient that he was bleeding from every orifice and wouldn’t live to see 40 if he didn’t change his lifestyle.
Amid this downward spiral, the Swish Shop went belly up because of its owner’s alcoholism. Swisher filed for bankruptcy and took a job as a garbage collector.
Swisher filed for bankruptcy and took a job as a garbage collector.
“In all three phases of my life I was bankrupt,” says Swisher, a future antique collector who ironically stole items during his most debauched era. “Morally, physically, and financially.”
Swisher was an unfaithful husband and barely paid attention to his four sons. Disheveled and dispirited, he got on a plane to California with his suitcase and around $500 in his pocket. He had a friend in the Golden State who could help him. Bob Swisher wanted to live past 40.
Swisher’s next browsing excursion of the morning occurs at House with the Lions Antiques in Covington, Indiana. He sees owner Carol Freese and asks about her health. Freese says she’s “scared to say” and knocks on the wood of a nearby table that’s for sale. Swisher can’t wait to give her his news.
“My cardiologist told me I didn’t have to see him anymore,” he informs her.
“Well, that’s good.”
“He said, ‘The way you’re going, Swish, you ought to live into the 90s.’”
Freese laughs. “Right on. Keep antiquing, right?”
“I’ve been kind of walking on air ever since then.”
The friend in California was named Barney, and he became Swisher’s AA sponsor. During his first year out west, Swisher says he attended 514 AA meetings. Reluctant to sober up at first, he watched people admit they were alcoholics and then talk about lost jobs, lost marriages, and lost health. Beneath all the misery, however, surprising positivity emerged.
“They were up there sober and laughing and having a good time,” Swisher remembers. “I was jealous of what they had. I wanted to be a part of them.”
Swisher lived in California for 22 months, eventually finding a job in his field and making good money, cleaning himself up, trying to inch back to the type of man who could respectably return home to his family in Urbana. His kids were well taken care of by Carol, who was a nurse, and two sets of grandparents who helped raise them.
When a rough California earthquake scared the bejesus out of him, Swisher knew it was time to go home. He returned to Illinois sober and hasn’t touched an alcoholic drink for close to 46 years. With his senses sharpened and his artistic skills back, Swisher started another commercial arts company in the early 1970s called Abana Press Inc., which churned out a slew of memorable business images that longtime residents of C-U would recognize today.
“Things just came right and the community accepted me back. I went from people walking across the street to avoid me to people saying, ‘Swish, can I get a meeting with you.’”
Sober now but unhappy in his personal life, Swisher surprised his family by divorcing Carol. Meanwhile, he filled the void his former tavern time left by collecting antiques with gusto, oftentimes with Gary Blum, who would go on to write novels under the pen name Gary Devon. When Swisher retired from Abana Press after 27 years, his pastime became a passion that expanded to antiquing jaunts in Illinois and in cities nationwide.
But it hasn’t been the great finds, the income on the side, the tasteful décor of his oak-styled home, or the joyous collecting experiences that he writes about regularly in The News-Gazette that Swisher likes best about his chosen hobby.
What he appreciates most about antiquing is that it has kept him clean and alive.
As he is prone to do, Swisher tells an old story to Freese, Freese’s coworker, and a customer, an anecdote that might be considered uncouth in some circles. He has the group laughing in no time.
“You caused a lot of trouble, didn’t you?” Freese teases.
“Well, it was a true story,” Swisher reasons.
Another shop. Another dealer. Another story. Another laugh.
The old codger may last to the age of some of his oldest possessions, but Bob Swisher is at peace if he dies tomorrow.
It’s been a life gratefully lived.
Photo by Sal Nudo.
This story and eight others can be found in the book Far From Mars: Nine Creative Nonfiction Stories Featuring People and Places in Champaign-Urbana.