Eulogy

This is the Eulogy I wrote for my Dad's funeral

Steve was the epitome of an optimist.  He was full of life and always saw the good side of people.  Many of you here count him as one of your best friends.  Some of you even from your teen years.  Once Steve made a friend he never forgot them.  In informing people of his death, it has been surprising at how often he spoke with his old friends. Steve was the kind of guy who would give you the shirt off his back without a second thought and then forget you had it.  How many of us have at home a book or tool that he loaned us and we forgot to return?  He never hesitated to help a friend in need and relationships were more important to him than material possessions.

He attributed two things to shaping the man he was.  Boys Scouts and The Navigators.  From the Boy Scouts he learned leadership, integrity and character.  He spent his youth climbing the ladder up to an Eagle Scout.  He loved camping in the mountains and the canyons.  The Grand Canyon was one of his favorite places to visit, and he made many trips there in his lifetime.  In his teens, he was a charter member of an Explorer Post at South High in Wichita that focused on flying.  The club with which he was involved in raised enough money to purchase a Cessna 150.  He used that to learn to fly and obtain his pilots license with the help of Jim Anders.

From the Navigators, he learned Scripture memory and could quote large sections.  He never forgot those verses which he memorized and would quote them regularly.  In the last few years, he has been working in a prison ministry helping inmates learn and memorize the word of God.

He met and married Sharon in 1972 while he was working at Coleman.  When Ruth was born in 77’, Cessna laid Steve off and he sought out a new job.  Bill Lear was working on a new plane that was to be made out of composite material.  Steve jumped on the chance to help pioneer a new field of flight.  He moved the family to Loyalton, California, just across the state border from Reno, Nevada.  It was in Reno that the Lear Fan was built.  It took it’s first flight on January 1st, 1981.  Because it was a day later than the goal, it was said that the plane took it’s first flight on December 32, 1980.  Only a few planes were built and after failing to obtain FAA certification the company closed it’s doors.  One of those planes currently hangs in the Smithsonian Museum in Seattle; another at a flight museum in Dallas.  Steve was then left to find a new job, and with a good friend Craig McHenry, he started Composite Tooling International, also called CTI.  In the next 5 years, he did various jobs for both private industry and the government.  One of his final jobs was working on a contract for NASA.  After the Challenger Space Shuttle crashed, work was stopped and seeing an opportunity to leave the stress of small business, he took a job in Pennsylvania working with Alcoa Building Products in the Research and Development department.  Alcoa was not only in the aluminum industry but also in other fields.  While the job was a good one, it was short lived and within 4 years he accepted a job at Stolle, a division of Alcoa in Sidney, Ohio.  Stolle manufactured windows and siding.  It was in Sidney that he decided to build another home, the first being in Loyalton, California.  Contrary to his better judgment, he built a 30 by 40 foot barn for Ruth’s horses before the house was put up.  After years of taking Ruth to horseback riding lessons, he learned that most people put their money in the barn while living in trailers; he never wanted to see that happen to his family.  The barn was almost exclusively built by himself and Ruth, all two stories.  When it came time for the house he had a contractor build it up to a certain point, all based on Steve’s design, and then using his experience with windows and siding he finished off the house with help from family and friends.

In 1995 after a Strep infection, Steve suffered kidney failure requiring him to do dialysis.    In 96’, he received a transplant at the University of Cincinnati.  Such events cause a person to look at their future and prioritize what is important to them.  With Ruth getting married, Steve decided to seek a job in Wichita and return home.  Doing so brought him first to a small plane company in Oklahoma and then to Boeing.  Ruth had married Chad Baker and seeing an opportunity to enter the airplane industry, Chad took a job with Boeing and also moved to Wichita.  With that move, the family had come full circle after moving around the United States.  When Spirit started up and the big shuffle took place between Boeing and Spirit, Steve went with Spirit, once again in the R & D department.  In April of 2010, Steve took early retirement with the intention of working on his dream, a cabin in Southern Colorado and also spending time with his grandkids.  It became the third house he designed and was built in a classical Steve fashion; lots of customization and neat ideas.  It was his plan to not only use it for himself but as a fun place to spend time with Nora, Nathaniel and Timothy.  That is how it earned the name “Pappy’s Cabin”.

He was a brilliant man with 7 patents to his name with several more in the process of being approved.  He could sit down and design a process with which to make a tool cheaper, easier, and faster than anyone else, but at the end of the day he didn’t see what all the fuss was about.  He could always come up with a better way of doing things, sometimes that process took more time than it would have been to build it the old way.   But that was the Steve we all knew and loved.  He will be greatly missed by all.  We not only lost a good friend but a father, grandfather, son and brother.  Some of us will see him again and that is a day to look forward to.