GARY SCHWAB spent more than three decades with The Charlotte Observer: sports editor, investigations/projects editor and finally senior editor for the newsroom. As a writer, he won the Society of Professional Journalists’ Green Eyeshade Award three times, 2014-16. He edited the Pulitzer-finalist, Polk- and Loeb-winning “Sold a Nightmare” series in 2008 and the Robert F. Kennedy Award-winning “The Cruelest Cuts” in 2009. Separately: In 1983, he co-wrote “The Edge,” a sports motivation book still in print, and in 2025 completed “Brotherhood of the Mats,” a book about one of American sports’ greatest dynasties: the high school wrestling program of St. Edward’s in Cleveland, his hometown. He has an ending named after him.

HELEN SCHWAB also spent 35+ years in The Observer newsroom, in sports, metro, design and features, finishing as arts + culture editor. She diversified freelance staff; led community outreach efforts; spearheaded new sections; secured and administered six-figure grant funding, and was, perhaps, the last un-photographed-for-publication restaurant critic in America before this. Separately: As a consultant for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, she cowrote a successful multimillion-dollar federal grant for writing instruction, and now she is working with an educator on a Charlotte history podcast, a historian on a project about Mecklenburg slavery and a librarian who coaches teen journalists.

They are married, with two remarkable daughters — a lawyer and a psychotherapist — who say growing up in a newsroom taught them how vital, and perspective-changing, storytelling can be.