Wilmer Swartley

Wilmer C. (Bill) Swartley, formerly of West Newton, Mass. and Nantucket, and for many years Vice President of Westinghouse Broadcasting Company's stations WBZ-TV and WBZ Radio in Boston, died Wednesday January 23 in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. He was 104.
He was born at home in North Wales, Pennsylvania, a small town north of Philadelphia, in 1908. His father had been raised a Mennonite and Swartley told stories of spending summers on his grandparents' farm with its horse-drawn buggies. But he, like his own father, was fascinated with machinery and he always enjoyed the latest technology, be it his Minox camera or the cell phone he carried in his later years. He attended Philadelphia's William Penn Charter School and Cornell University, where he received a degree in mechanical engineering and played violin in the university orchestra. After graduation, he took a job with Westinghouse in their Pittsburgh headquarters and remained with the company for the rest of his working life.
Radio fascinated him, combining as it did his lifelong interests in music, storytelling, and public service. Following his 1937 marriage to Eleanore McKnight, a nurse he met while briefly hospitalized in Pittsburgh, he became manager of Westinghouse radio station WOWO in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Soon after their arrival, Eleanore was diagnosed with tuberculosis and it was a sign of Swartley's congenital optimism that he bought her a fur coat for Christmas and spread it on her sanitarium bed, betting she would get well to wear it. She did.
In 1940 Westinghouse transferred him to Boston to supervise the start up of what would become New England's first television station. World War II delayed the station's construction, and it was while Swartley was serving as a major in the Army's Boston Ordnance office that he and Eleanore discovered Nantucket. It was love at first sight. They returned yearly, becoming members of Cliffside Beach Club, the Nantucket Yacht Club and the Artists Association. In 1963 they bought a house on Pine Street which became a center of their family's life for the next forty years.
Swartley was a past president of Boston Rotary and, after he retired from Westinghouse in 1969, an enthusiastic summer and fall attendee in Nantucket. In 2010 he was inducted into the Massachusetts Broadcasters Hall of Fame. Still dapper at 102, he attended the luncheon and made a brief speech. The plaque he received with an engraving of the original WBZ tower whose construction he'd overseen, was a treasured possession. As was his violin, which he played until his final months.
Survivors include his daughter, Ariel Swartley and her partner Richard Matthews of San Pedro, California, his beloved granddaughter Austen Rachlis and her husband, Jason Wojciechowski of Los Angeles, California, and the many nephews, nieces, grand nephews, and children of friends whose company he delighted in. A memorial service in Newton is planned for April, 2013.


Funeral Home:
Green Hills Mortuary and Memorial Chapel
27501 S.Western Ave.
Rancho Palos Verdes, CA
US 90275