David S. Swayze (1944-2026)

Nassau Herald

Memories and Tributes

Celia Cohen, a journalist friend of David’s. Added March 6, 2026

If you can keep your head when all about are losing theirs, then you would be a man, the poet said, but what man would you be?

You would be David Stewart Swayze.

Dave Swayze was the kind who would have climbed the steeple and lit the lanterns in the Old North Church for Paul Revere. He would have defended John Scopes in the Monkey Trial for teaching evolution. He would have found courage for the Cowardly Lion, wisdom for the Scarecrow, a heart for the Tin Woodman, without any humbug, and he would have escorted Dorothy safely home.

Amid crisis, commotion and confusion, Swayze was the calm.

“In chaos, there is opportunity,” he once cracked.

Maybe it was because he believed in a just world.

“All that any of us can ask for is due process,” he also said.

So Swayze had to be a lawyer. Had to. Had to answer the call whenever his native state of Delaware asked. Had to offer wise counsel. Had to keep giving and giving long after people would have said he had done more than enough.

Swayze is gone. He died after complications from a fall at 81 on Jan. 23. When his family and his friends and his comrades from a public life well-lived come together on May 8 for a celebration-of-life at the Wilmington Country Club, they will remember him for who he was and marvel at the legacy of what he did.

Among his dearest mourners are his wife Carolyn DePew-Swayze, his daughter Lisa Swayze-Thomas and her husband Melvin, his son Scott Swayze, his brother Bruce Swayze and his wife Mary, his sister Patricia Ball and her husband Jim, and many nieces, nephews and cousins.

Delaware was as much in Dave Swayze as he was in Delaware. For people who love this state in their core, there is no higher praise.

All of the state was part of him. He was an upstate boy by birth from New Castle County and never lost a Wilmington state of mind. His law practice and lobbying anchored him in Dover, the state capital in Kent County. He settled for the duration in Dagsboro in Sussex County, in the last reaches of Delaware before the border with Maryland.

His politics were mildly Democrat. Mildly, because his perspective was too eclectic to be straitjacketed, and he made his name when he worked for Pete du Pont, the patrician Republican governor, during his first term from 1977 to 1981, initially as counsel and finally as chief of staff.

Swayze took his first foray into public life at a time of seismic stirrings in state politics. At the time he was admitted to the bar in 1969, after Princeton and law school at the University of Pennsylvania, the state was dominated by Republican officeholders like Senator Bill Roth, Governor Russell Peterson and Wilmington Mayor Hal Haskell, centrists who maybe could be seen to lean right if you squinted.

But the Democrats were coming, young Democrats who were as taken by the Kennedy magic of Camelot as the medieval knights who rode to the Round Table, Democrats like Joe Biden elected senator and Tom Maloney elected as Wilmington’s mayor in 1972.

The new mayor needed a new city solicitor. Enter Swayze.

With Maloney intent on giving new hope and new life to the city with projects like the Market Street Mall and a lift to the theater and the arts, Swayze was there to offer counsel and to make over the solicitor’s office, which was overdue for it.

Wilmington was only four years removed from the shock of riots after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and the National Guard left on the streets for months, long after any threats of disorder, until it turned into a national laughingstock as the longest occupation of an American city since the Civil War.

Swayze brought in the first Black attorneys, two of them, Charles Toliver and Alex Smalls, when there was hardly anybody doing anything for young Black lawyers. They made the most of it, and so did Delaware. Toliver went on to be a Superior Court judge, and Smalls became the chief judge of the Court of Common Pleas.

Swayze was on his way, too, to the governor’s office after du Pont was elected in 1976.

It was a governorship, lasting two terms, that began in peril and ended in a lustrous triumph that touched the people who worked there.

At the opening, though, the state’s finances were a sulfurous sinkhole, and there was bad blood between the Republican governor and the Democrats running the General Assembly, so bad and so petty that the Democrats threw Swayze out of a statehouse office so the Democratic lieutenant governor could have more room. Because they could.

The finances could be turned around, and they were, and the governor and the legislature could find a way to get along, and they did. By the end of du Pont’s first term, the good times were coming.

Swayze was in on one of the greatest economic coups in state history. It was called the Financial Center Development Act, a new law favorable to banks for setting up their credit card operations here. It took a tense battle in the legislature in 1981 to get it enacted, but it was, and it surpassed the wildest hopes for its success.

Two banks had committed to coming if the legislation was adopted, and du Pont thought there might be a handful, but at the peak thirty banks had operations here.

The new law galvanized what had been a sad-sack economy, reliant for decades on the “Three Cs” of chemicals, chickens and corporate law. Now there were “Four Cs” with credit cards, too.

Meanwhile, Swayze was not done making judges. While he was counsel to the governor, the assistant counsel was Battle Robinson. She had a Family Court judgeship in her future, although she was best known for becoming the first woman to practice law in Sussex County in 1970. She also got very tired of being introduced for years as “the first lawyer in Sussex County ever to have a baby.”

By now, Swayze was ready for a new kind of pathbreaking, this time with private law firms.

It was not quite Lewis and Clark opening up the West, but out-of-state law firms were establishing satellite offices here for a stake in the lucrative corporate law franchise, and Swayze helped to bring in a couple of them. Still, Delaware and Delawareans have an autonomous streak that runs deep, and Swayze found himself missing homegrown surroundings.

After years of courting Michael Parkowski and his Dover-headquartered practice of Parkowski & Guerke to become the downstate office for an out-of-state firm, Swayze flipped and went with them in 2003. It took a new name: Parkowski Guerke & Swayze.

“Essentially we’re counterattacking,” Parkowski quipped then.

At about the same time, Swayze had another union in mind. He married Carolyn DePew, an administrator at Delaware Technical & Community College and a former aide to Dale Wolf, a Republican lieutenant governor in the late 1980s. Like the law firm, DePew added Swayze’s name to become Carolyn DePew-Swayze.

The wedding was held at their home in Dagsboro with all sorts of judges, lawyers, legislators and lobbyists as guests. They were married by Henry duPont Ridgely, a close friend, who was the Superior Court’s president judge and later a state Supreme Court justice.

Swayze wore a kilt. It is hard to think of a better way for a man to show how comfortable he is in his own soul.

Swayze was tireless in his dedication to a more perfect Delaware. He chaired Downtown Visions, a nonprofit organization overseeing the Wilmington business district, and American Red Cross of Delmarva Peninsula. He was president of the Lincoln Club of Delaware. He was particularly proud to be one of the graduates in the Mount Pleasant High School Hall of Fame.

The highest of Delaware accolades came to Swayze in 2022, when he was called “a wise man of Delaware” and given the Order of the First State by John Carney, then the Democratic governor.

“When I think about the last fifty or sixty years and the progress we’ve made in Delaware, no one is more representative than this wise man standing next to me,” Carney said.

It was one of those moments that completed a circle. As Swayze explained, when he was a student at Mount Pleasant High School, there was a guidance counselor who had pointed him on his way, and the guidance counselor was Jack Carney, the father of John.

Once upon a time, Swayze was heard to say, “Delaware discards you along the way if you don’t make the cut.”

Delaware never discarded Swayze, and Swayze never discarded Delaware. Never.

John Hoerster:

Dave Burnett:

Steve Herrmann:

I was Dave’s roommate along with Dave Burnett for only our junior year. We lived in Blair Hall.  We ate at different clubs and we were in different academic departments so most of our interactions with each other were in the evening and weekends.  Dave was a smart guy and showed his  future skills as a lawyer during our many  discussions about everything from woman to world peace. We both smoked unfiltered cigarettes (Camels for him and Lucky Strikes for me). I think Burnett smoked some kind of french cig.  So the room always had the aroma of an ash tray. Our favorite late night snack was sausage pizza from the student pizza agency which we called “zige za”.  Dave had a sharp sense of humor and we did a lot of laughing and joking. After graduation we lost track of each other and only  connected once around the time of the 50th. We suggested plans to meet up again but unfortunately it never happened. I wish it had. My condolences to Dave’s family.

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