Phillip M. Swatek
After service as a Naval Aviator in North Africa and Britain during World War II, Phillip M. Swatek began his writing career as a newspaper reporter and editor in West Texas, where he also penned articles for Southwestern ranch and farm magazines.
Phil followed the journalism and magazine writing trail east, and in 1956 became Washington Correspondent and Chief of the Washington Bureau for The Cincinnati Enquirer. One of the articles he wrote during this period, the account of his voyage with the U.S. Coast Guard on an icy mission in the far North Atlantic, appeared in National Geographic, and is included in the National Geographic anthology, Men, Ships, and the Sea.
Covering national political campaigns was an essential part of his job as Washington Correspondent, and Phil traveled extensively with all the presidential candidates in the election of 1960, including Jack Kennedy.
When Kennedy was elected President, Phil went into public relations as the Director of Public Affairs for the Federal Aviation Agency. That ultimately led to decades of work and travel as a Regional Director for the FAA, with posts in the Asia‑Pacific, Latin America, and Europe, Africa, and the Middle East regions.
When Phil retired from government service in 1985, he and his wife left Brussels, Belgium and moved back to the United States. He and Margaret moved to their present home in Melbourne, Florida in 1990. Phil taught as an adjunct professor and lecturer at Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne before turning his attention to writing full-time.
Phil had always been interested in the history of the Old West, and fascinated by the mystery surrounding the infamous hanging of 1909 in Ada, Oklahoma—his wife's hometown. As he visited Ada with his wife, the former Margaret Harris, and their children over the years, he grew ever more interested in this story popular in Southwestern lore. It was the natural subject for this first book, The Pontotoc Conspiracy.
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