The family historian
Albert John Schweickart is my uncle. He grew up with his brother Brian in the family whose history he later spent years recording. Their mother Eleanor saved photographs and documents; relatives contributed stories and research. Those materials became the basis for the genealogy books and for John’s accounts of his own life.[1]
Growing up in Allen Park
John’s first volume follows childhood from Ironton and Detroit to Allen Park. He recalls the family moving to Allen Park in December 1950 and settling into a new neighborhood near Sudman Elementary School. He began school at Sudman in 1952 and later attended Allen Park Junior High.[2]
The book records the neighborhood in small, specific scenes. Albert coached the Sudman PTA Lions baseball team. For several winters, his parents built a lighted ice rink in the backyard, spraying water in the cold so the neighborhood children could skate and play hockey. John also took a Mellus newspaper route to earn money. Photographs and saved school material sit alongside these recollections.[2]
High school, swimming, and university
John entered Allen Park High School in 1960. Swimming became an important part of those years: the book preserves team photographs, race results, varsity letters, and his account of captaining the team. He graduated in 1964 and entered the University of Michigan’s chemical-engineering program in Ann Arbor.[3]
Summer work helped support his studies. In 1965, he worked in a Dearborn Heights warehouse holding Ford’s archives, building shelves and organizing boxes of surviving documents and photographs. In 1967, he worked as a laboratory color technician at Ford’s vinyl plant in Mount Clemens. The university chapters describe those jobs alongside classes, friends, and the effort of paying for school.[3]
From graduate school into the Army
John completed his undergraduate degree in May 1969 and began graduate study at Michigan. His studies were interrupted when he was drafted that autumn. He entered the Army through Fort Wayne in Detroit, completed basic training at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and went to Fort Sam Houston in Texas for medical-corpsman training.[4]
His next assignment was the Army hospital at Fort Ord, California. He worked in the emergency room with doctors, nurses, and other medics, caring for military personnel and their families. The account follows the responsibilities he learned, the people he worked with, and a later surgical-clinic assignment. Letters home and service documents accompany his memories of this period.[4]
Returning to Michigan
After leaving the Army in 1971, John returned to the University of Michigan. He completed a master’s degree in chemical engineering in 1973 and joined BASF Wyandotte’s Process Engineering Research and Development Group. He describes working with a team of young engineers on experimental chlorine and caustic manufacturing technology.[5]
In 1975, he married Nancy, whom he had known in high school and met again at a class reunion. The volume closes around that transition into married and professional life. His later question-led book, A Collection of My Life Stories, revisits family, work, places, and changes he witnessed over a longer span.[1]
John’s West Berlin equipment test, on Schweickart Media →
The books he left for descendants
John explains that he wrote so descendants could know something of the person behind the photographs. The three chronological volumes preserve the first twenty-eight years of his life; the later stories add another way into his memories. They also show how he worked as a family historian: gathering records, asking relatives, identifying photographs, and writing down what he remembered.[1]
The archive and chronology lists the volumes and the earlier family histories he compiled.