“My most obsessive interest is baseball. In 1976 I was identified in the public print as ’The world's foremost authority on baseball’—which I am NOT . . . but I'm pretty good.”
Larry Swindell was born in rural north Texas in 1929 (nine years after Mickey Rooney) and has been a Californian since 1940. He graduated from UCLA in 1952, where he majored in English with a history minor. After graduation he served a two-year conscription in the US Army from 1952-54. Larry has been married twice, (both wives were UCLA Bruins) – first to Ellie who was also the mother of their five children. She died in 1983. He married Pat in 1998 and they currently reside in Moraga.
Mr. Swindell’s professional newspaper career spanned 45 years in New York, California, Pennsylvania and Texas (in that order). His newspaper career included two years as editor of The Orange County Illustrated magazine in Newport Beach, CA. During his years in New York, he was the Broadway drama critic for a chain of eight suburban newspapers, all in New York's Westchester County and a librettist for a musical play that never reached Broadway. He served as literary editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer from 1967 to 1979, and for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 1980 to 1999. Larry was also a Founding director of the National Book Critics Circle.
The diversity of his career continues: Interspersed with his newspaper career, Mr. Swindell also taught composition and literature courses at five universities: Maryland; UC Irvine; LaSalle University (Philadelphia); Delaware; and Texas Christian University for 19 years in Fort Worth. Larry Swindell has had a lifelong love affair with the movie industry. He is the author of five film biographies, all heavily rooted in Hollywood history. In publishing sequence they are:
Spencer Tracy (national bestseller)
Body and Soul: The Story of John Garfield
Screwball: The Life of Carole Lombard
The Last Hero (this biography of Gary Cooper was a national bestseller and Literary Guild selection).
Charles Boyer: The Reluctant Lover
This entire collection has been published in eight languages. “While still in my teens, I was a regular panelist for screenings of The Great Films Society, the first seriously constituted study of movies both domestic and foreign, silent and sound.”
Locally, Larry has served on boards for the Moraga Park Commission and the Moraga Historical Society. Since 2006, he has been the editor of the historical society's El Rancho Moraga Quarterly. He is currently a member of Kiwanis of Moraga Valley since 2004, the Moraga Movers, SIRS (Sons in Retirement). For six years he was the facilitator for RAMs (Retired Active Members) for Moraga Valley Presbyterian Church.
