If you’ve called in to The Catholic Echo offices—The Catholic Exponent before that—over the past 30 years, the subtle Texas twang you likely heard on the other end of the line belongs to Annetta “Netta” Sweetko. Senior designer at The Catholic Echo, Sweetko was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and moved to Youngstown in 1975, after she married her late husband, John.
Sweetko was raised Protestant, but she vividly remembers her first encounter with the Catholic Church when she was 12. “I went with a girlfriend to church. Those were the days when you went to confession every Friday. Well, we were going to do something together and her parents said, ‘Not until you go to confession,’” Sweetko recalled. “So they pinned a doily on my head and showed me how to genuflect, and I sat down and waited. There was a line of people all around this humongous church … I’m just looking at all the statues and the lights and the stained glass and said, ‘You know what? I’m going to be Catholic someday.’”
That day came when she had her daughter, Andrea, and she and John realized they wanted religion to be part of their family life. John was already Catholic, so he acted as Sweetko’s OCIA sponsor as she went through the process of becoming Catholic.
“It is a very athletic religion,” Sweetko recalls joking with her husband after Mass one day. “It’s ‘stand up,’ ‘kneel,’ ‘stand up,’ ‘sit.’ When you’re Protestant, you go to church, you hang up your coat, you sit down in a pew. Catholics, you don’t even take off your coat!”
Despite that, she has always been happy with her choice to become Catholic and immediately started to volunteer at her parish, St. John the Baptist (part of Christ the Good Shepherd Parish) in Campbell. She became the volunteer secretary for Sister Teresa Winsen, who was building up the CCD and youth ministry programs after the closure of the parish school. Sweetko also began teaching CCD—something she did for 16 years.
Then, as her kids got older, she decided to apply for the part- time clerk typist position at The Catholic Exponent, to earn some additional income for the household. She started in that role in 1990 and has been with the organization ever since. “I continued working and became full time in a few months. I hadn’t planned to, I only planned on working until my kids were out of college, and then it became a really fun habit, so I stayed,” Sweetko said.
She quickly became The Exponent’s parish news editor, but then began filling in on the production side of the operation when necessary. She became the production director a couple years later, when the person in the role took a leave and eventually decided to move.
“I would lay out the newspaper. At one point we printed it out and pasted it down. We did the ol’ paste-up,” Sweetko said. She remembers every iteration of publishing technology The Exponent used—including the various software programs—up until now. A holdover from her clerk typist days, Sweetko continued answering phones for the office—a responsibility that only recently ended with the hiring of The Echo’s new administrative assistant, Andrea Taddei.
As the newspaper began the transition to its current magazine format in 2022, Sweetko became the senior designer. “I was thrilled. Because about the same time … my husband was diagnosed with cancer. So, moving from one thing to the next helped me keep going.”
“And believe me,” Sweetko added. “I don’t know what other people think of the diocese or the people who work here, but to me they are heaven-sent. Bishop Bonnar, Monsignor Siffrin, Monsignor Zuraw, they were there—whatever I needed. Everybody would send prayers. I honestly believe—my husband’s prognosis was a year, but he lived two years—it was the diocese, the people on staff who became like family that kept us going and kept him going.”
Sweetko’s children are now grown—Andrea worked for more than 20 years in registration for Mercy Health – St. Elizabeth Youngstown Hospital and her son John got his Ph.D. in nursing and is working as a quality scholar advance fellow at the Cleveland VA Medical Center. And now that she has more than a year of Echo magazines under her belt, she feels she has really been hitting her stride.
“I love what I do at The Echo,” Sweetko said. “As senior designer I have the freedom to be creative, and I feel that what we do is (hopefully) enlightening as well as entertaining—while bringing everyone in the diocese together as one.”
