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Archie Dean Swift

Paternal Grandfather

Lt.-Col. Archie Dean Swift was Taylor’s paternal grandfather. He was born 21 December, 1914 at Elk County General Hospital in Ridgway, Pennsylvania, to Archie Dean Swift (1877-1961) and Bernice Maude Thompson (1882-1979).
Archie was born on December 21, 1914 at Elk County General Hospital in Ridgway, Pennsylvania. He married first to Barbara Newton Godley in New York City, but they divorced. Archie joined the United States Marine Corps May 3, 1938 and fought in World War II. He later married secondly to Rose Baldi Douglas, on March 21, 1942 in Roxborough, Pennsylvania. They had three children, Archie III, Douglas, and Scott, Taylor’s father. Archie died on September 2, 1998 in Reading, Pennsylvania.

His experiences during World War II inspired Taylor to write the song “epiphany” which appears on her eighth studio album, folklore (2020). She told Entertainment Weekly in 2020:

«I wanted to write about him for a while. He died when I was very young, but my dad would always tell this story that the only thing that his dad would ever say about the war was when somebody would ask him, 'Why do you have such a positive outlook on life?' My grandfather would reply, 'Well, I'm not supposed to be here. I shouldn't be here.' My dad and his brothers always kind of imagined that what he had experienced was really awful and traumatic and that he'd seen a lot of terrible things. So when they did research, they learned that he had fought at the Battles of Guadalcanal, at Cape Gloucester, at Talasea, at Okinawa. He had seen a lot of heavy fire and casualties — all of the things that nightmares are made of. He was one of the first people to sign up for the war. But you know, these are things that you can only imagine that a lot of people in that generation didn't speak about because, a) they didn't want people that they came home to to worry about them, and b) it just was so bad that it was the actual definition of unspeakable.»

General Information
BornDecember 21, 1914
Ridgway, Pennsylvania, USA
DiedSeptember 2, 1998
Reading, Pennsylvania, USA
SpouseRose Baldi Swift (m. 1942)
ChildrenArchie Swift III
Douglas Swift
Scott Swift
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