Meet Laurie Schwab
She:
“Flighty, air-headed, musician-extrovert.”
He: “Kinda traditional, head-on-shoulders, strong, silent, sensible.”
Offspring:
Tow-headed charmer. Performer. The parish’s miracle baby.
If you can’t identify the above family after more than two attempts you really ought to think about getting more sleep before you come to church. Tim, Laurie and Benjamin Schwab are hard to miss.
Especially Laurie. She has been St. Peter’s barefoot organist for the past six years. She’s a keyboard and viola soloist, an accompanist, a composer and an arranger. Along with her musician’s unpredictably, she can be mischievously honest (those descriptions of herself and Tim are hers) and insatiably curious.
If you can grasp the last one, you might begin to understand something about Laurie (Pressly) Schwab’s past.
“When I first went to college (UMKC, Fall of ’87) my major was viola performance,” she grins against the steady blast of a Panera’s air conditioning blower. “I wanted to be a musician but I didn’t think I could make a living at it. So I went to school for five years and didn’t graduate. I majored in everything. I guess you could say I floundered a lot. One time I was into accounting. Then business. Then Sociology. I even took an ROTC course! I had a huge number of hours but there weren’t enough in one field to graduate.” So she dropped out and became the office manager of a company that managed Kansas City parking garages for a year. Naturally, she then went to Chicago and did the same thing for another two and a half years.
“I got promoted up to the point I knew I probably wouldn’t go higher. I could have stayed in Chicago and wade through the rat race by myself or come back to my family here.”
Her family adopted her when she was two weeks old. Her parents lived in Lee’s Summit where she was raised and still lives. Both parents are Episcopalians and have been members of St. Paul’s in that town all of her life. Her dad was manager of the American Royal Horse Show for many years and today is a realtor. Her mother is a homemaker. Neither is musically inclined.
But they had a piano and her mother, after watching three-year-old Laurie press on the keyboard with her fingers rather than bang with her fists, decided to sign her up for piano lessons. She took up the viola at nine and the saxophone at 11. In high school she was first chair viola in the Kansas City Youth Symphony and the Missouri High School All-State Orchestra.
Did being adopted have any effect on her future life?
“I don’t think so,” she replies after an uncharacteristic lengthy pause. “No, I don’t think so. There’s been some times when I’ve been curious to know if there some sort of musical gene in here but, mainly, no.”
Older, wiser and more experienced, Laurie returned to UMKC in 1995. She studied the organ, was an overnight bellhop at the Crown Center Hyatt and, in 1997, graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Music Theory.
While still at UMKC (Part Two) she had been hired as the organist at St. Paul’s. There she met another parishioner named Tim Schwab who was the percussionist in the church’s contemporary music group.
“Met” is perhaps the wrong word. “I heard that he was divorced and I thought he needed a friend,” Laurie smiled. “He sort of intrigued me. He’d come to rehearsal, play the drums and leave without saying a word. He was sort of an enigma. I walked up to him one day and invited him to lunch. He totally blew me off!
“I don’t know if it was through divine intervention or my stupidity but I approached him again. Again, he blew me off. Finally, I think he went to lunch just in order to get rid of me. We hit it off.”
Really. They were married in October, 1998. They arrived at St. Peter’s in 2001 when Laurie was appointed organist. Two years later, what Laurie describes as “the biggest surprise on the planet” occurred.
Like her mother, Laurie was not supposed to be able to bear children. On Good Friday, 2003, she was timing her contractions while she played the organ at the noon service. Benjamin Laurence Schwab and his miniscule 4 pounds, 3 ounces, came into the world Saturday morning. On Easter morning the following day, Laurie was back playing the organ at St. Peter’s.
“Tim always said, jokingly I think, that he always wanted a woman who could go out and plow the north 40, have a baby and then cook dinner,” she quipped.
Ben had a tough time of it but finally got home after seven weeks to a lot of answered prayers that had started in St. Peters pews. Laurie, who grew up in what she describes as a “Leave It To Beaver” home today is part of one that might surprise Ward and June Cleaver just a tad.
Tim and Laurie have a TV set at home but it is seldom, if ever, on. Between recitals, theater orchestras (both can be found in many an orchestra pit in KC), church functions and all the preparations associated with them and taking care of an active 4-year-old boy, there’s not much time or interest in realty TV.
And that doesn’t take into account the some 130 turtles (including five 60-pound African Sulcata Tortoises, about 30 snakes, three dogs and five birds in and around the Lee’s Summit house.
“Tim has been into reptiles since he was a kid,” Laurie sighed. “It’s a good thing I’ve always loved animals. I wonder if he just needed a woman who liked snakes.”
If her mind is restless, Laurie says her faith isn’t. “I got lucky. God gave me a gift and I’m good at it. In the Fall of 1997 I went to a Cursillo. It was one of those moments when everything becomes crystal clear. For me it was the realization that God gave me this gift and you don’t just say ‘thanks’ and take a pass. My faith sustains my music and my music sustains my faith.”
She keeps busy with the music (she also directs St. Peter’s Youth Choir, is the accompanist at O’Hara High School) and has her ambitions.
“I’d love to be the Front Man. The pretty girl in the red dress belting out the tunes. But, I’m still the girl in black sitting in the back.”
She thinks about that one for a second and has to slap a hand over her mouth to suppress the laugh.
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