PHOTO BY JESSE DAVIS / THE VILLAGE REPORTER
COUNCILMAN AND COMMANDER … Swanton Village Councilman John Schmidt poses in front of the village seal in council chambers. Schmidt is a U.S. Army veteran, having retired with the rank of sergeant first class after 20 years of service. In addition to his council duties, Schmidt serves as commander of the Swanton American Legion Murbach-Siefert Post #479.
By: Jesse Davis
THE VILLAGE REPORTER
jesse@thevillagereporter.com
He may have been born and raised in Mansfield, but John Schmidt loves Swanton.
The 70-year-old Swanton Village Council member and commander of the Swanton American Legion Murbach-Siefert Post #479 first began serving his community and country when he joined the U.S. Army a few months after graduating from high school in 1973.
“Since I was a kid, I always wanted to be a police officer; that was my dream job. When I joined the Army, I realized that dream. I became a military policeman and did that for the first four years of my career,” Schmidt said.
After completing basic training at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri and military police school at Fort Gordon in Georgia, Schmidt was stationed at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, next to the U.S.-Mexico border. There, he served with several Vietnam War veterans.
“When I joined, I joined as a volunteer, but they were still sending troops to Vietnam, and I was sure I was going to go, but that never materialized,” he said.
During his stint as a military policeman, Schmidt had the chance to guard Air Force One when President Gerald Ford visited El Paso, landing at the Biggs Army Airfield at Fort Bliss, as well as to meet retired five-star general and the nation’s first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Omar Bradley, who was a commander in World War II and after whom the Bradley Fighting Vehicle is named.
“One of his favorite activities was betting on the dog races in Juarez, Mexico,” Schmidt said of Bradley.
In 1977, Schmidt decided to change jobs after getting “beat up too badly as an MP.” “I was 6’4″, weighed 149 pounds. I was just a beanpole,” Schmidt said. “I thought ‘There’s gotta be a better way.'”
So Schmidt went to school at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, in San Antonio, did on-the-job training at Fort Bliss, and started to work in hospitals as an X-ray technician, eventually ending up working at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C. There, he said, he became the first military technician to do CT scans in the United States.
“The first CT scan machine was put in at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. The second one was installed at Walter Reed Medical Center, and I was chosen to learn how to do CTs,” Schmidt said. “We developed – the doctors and I, as a tech – a lot of the protocols that are in use today for scanning the body.”
Through his work, he also came into contact with Mamie Eisenhower, the wife of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who Schmidt said came in every six months for a CT scan of her brain.
In 1981, Schmidt went back to Fort Sam Houston as an instructor of radiologic technology at the fort’s academy of health sciences until 1983, when he was sent to the Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, where he again did CT scans.
In 1986, he was transferred to Fort Polk, Louisiana, where he remained until he retired in 1993 as a sergeant first class.
Despite serving in the Army for 20 years, spanning conflicts in Vietnam, Lebanon, Grenada, and Kuwait, Schmidt never left the U.S., although he was initially forced to delay his retirement until Desert Storm wound down.
After retirement, Schmidt moved to Toledo, where his parents had moved when he first joined the military. He spent three years teaching corporate employees how to use desktop software for Knowledge Link in Maumee, then worked for several years at Bostwick-Braun, where he handled point-of-sale systems and network installations.
He eventually became bored with being stuck behind a desk and put in a successful application to manage IT services for Notre Dame Academy in 2001.
“I also moderated the aerospace science club,” he said. “While I was there, I took a group of four girls to the Team America Rocketry Challenge in Washington, D.C., that was sponsored by the National Association of Rocketry.”
The association invited 100 teams – two from each state – and the Notre Dame Academy team took second place overall.
“These girls got to meet people like Buzz Aldrin, who was the second man on the moon, and Jim Barrowman, the author of all of the scientific equations that allowed rockets to fly straight,” Schmidt said.
As a result of his involvement with the team and their win, Schmidt was invited to visit Redstone Arsenal, a U.S. Army base which houses, among other facilities, the United States Space Command and the Marshall Space Flight Center, NASA’s largest field center.
While there, he got to meet the son of famed rocket scientist Wernher von Braun. The elder von Braun was a member of the German Nazi Party before being brought to the U.S. after World War II as part of Operation Paperclip, working on both missile programs and the space program.
Schmidt took some time off from working after a few years with the school, then “got bored again” and applied for a job with the Social Security Administration at the then-new office in Toledo. He worked there for 12 years – again handling IT duties – before retiring in 2022.
It was during his tenure at Notre Dame Academy when, in 2008, he moved to Swanton. He had already been a member of the American Legion organization for 22 years and joined the Swanton post when he moved. He now serves as the post commander.
Schmidt said his favorite part of running the post is being on the honor guard, participating in community parades, and being able to honor fallen veterans at their funeral services. He also got the post involved in the national Wreaths Across America program.
“This will be our third year coming up,” he said. “I’m pretty proud of that legacy.”
While he was still working for the Social Security Administration, Schmidt first became interested in joining the Swanton Village Council after helping Mayor Neil Toeppe gather signatures on a petition to start the livestreaming of council meetings and to establish the economic development commission.
Despite filling out “a raft of paperwork” to prove the position was non-partisan due to the ban on federal employees serving in partisan positions under the Hatch Act, he was unsuccessful. He decided to try again after retiring and succeeded and was sworn in on Jan. 8, 2024.
Schmidt said he has learned a lot about how the village government operates and is happy to be a contact point for residents to have input into how their community is run.
“I don’t know if I’m going to run again to be the commander of the American Legion post. I have two years left to go on my village council term. I may run again for the same seat,” he said.
“I want to see Swanton continue to grow and be a place where families want to come. Things like our downtown parties that the chamber of commerce hosts. I’m trying to get golf carts a little less restricted within the village; that public hearing is coming up in November.”
Schmidt said he is motivated by the opportunity to improve Swanton not for himself, but for his and the residents’ children and grandchildren. Schmidt himself has a stepson, four grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. His wife, Linda, is also retired.
“I absolutely love this community, I really do,” he said. “In fact, last Memorial Day, when I was putting together the parade and the program for the Memorial Park celebration, I made it about kids. It’s about meeting the kids, doing all of these things. I love Swanton and how close-knit this community really is.”