In early July 2022, about a week before becoming the victim of a freak accident that would nearly take his life, longtime public-relations professional Gary Schweikhart became the president of the Carbonell Awards, which honor excellence in South Florida theatre. To honor this occasion, he commissioned a new official headshot for himself. “I said [to the photographer], ‘make me look younger, and make me look thinner. This is probably going to be my obit picture,’” he recalls. “Little did I realize how close it came!”
On July 11, Schweikart was at his home in west Boca, drafting a press release, when a reckless driver drove through a berm, then through about 6 feet of bushes, then straight into Schweikhart’s office, burying Schweikhart in the rubble and destroying the office entirely—as well as portions of his kitchen, a guest bathroom, and the entryway of the house.
Schweikhart was rushed to Delray Community Hospital, where he was unconscious for two days. When he came to, Rich Pollack, his friend and fellow publicist, was there to greet him. The first thing Schweikhart did, he said, was flip his colleague the bird—a sign to Pollack that he would make it through.
Schweikhart would spend several days in the ICU and two weeks in rehab. “My face was basically broken in half, and the mandible was broken; my nose was broken,” he says. “The area between my eyes was broken and had to be rebuilt. I had to have plastic surgery under my eye and on my right cheek.” Medical professionals, he said, “told me several times that I was really lucky to be alive.”
More than two years after the accident, Schweikhart, 73 and speaking from his handsomely reconstructed home office, still carries a scar on his right cheek, a permanent reminder of his brush with death. But he has returned to his normal self—garrulous, funny, opinionated, maybe a bit prickly; qualities that have contributed to his decades of success in public relations, media, entertainment and politics.
A native of Omaha, Nebraska, Schweikhart began creating—and soon publicizing—news from an early age. Skeptical of authority, he grew up gay in a family of fundamentalist churchgoers, and was twice excommunicated from his Baptist church for speaking out against the pastors. During the Vietnam War, he served as president of the Nebraska Council to Repeal the Draft, for which he wrote his first press release—and which blossomed into a career as a newspaper editor (for the San Francisco Sentinel, a respected LGBTQ weekly), radio and television host, campaign manager and theatre critic.
Schweikhart moved to Boca Raton in 1991, and since 2001, when he formed his public-relations firm, PR-BS, he’s been a permanent fixture in the growth of Palm Beach County, especially its arts and culture sector. He has represented nearly 40 cultural and educational organizations. In 2022, the last year he tracked his firm’s progress, his clients received 166 articles with a circulation of more than 7 million readers—numbers that have become more elusive in today’s splintered digital mediasphere.
“I’m a dinosaur,” he says. “I’m the kind of PR person that is fading away. I believe in getting stories for my clients in the newspaper. When I started my firm, working with nonprofit clients, there were a dozen different people in the entertainment section of the Palm Beach Post alone. … Every single one of them is gone. It’s not fun anymore.”
This lack of enthusiasm is reflected in his diminished workload. Schweikhart now publicizes a half-dozen core clients, down from at least 15 before the car accident.
It’s hard to imagine Schweikhart taking down his shingle and going gentle into that good night. But as he knows all too well, anything is possible, and every day is precious. “I’m not the same person after I’ve gone through [the accident],” he says. “It was a very traumatic experience. But boy, was I surrounded by a lot of good people. I couldn’t believe how the community rallied to my benefit.”
It didn’t hurt, he quickly adds, that “I had great attorneys who got me a whole lot of money, which makes it easier for me to wind down my business and concentrate on nonprofits like the Carbonell Awards and eventually move into retirement.”
This story is from the November/December 2024 issue of Boca magazine. For more like this, click here to subscribe to the magazine.
