My apologies if this remembrance reads a bit like an autobiography, but my life and Steve's have been intertwined for forty-some years.
I am sure the keyword in my student evaluation from December 1981 (PHY 111, freshman year) was “intimidating.” Forty-some years — clearly, I got over that. In fact, these last few years I have missed Steve's characteristic energy and confidence that illness stripped away.
I think I was supposed to have Steve in the spring of my sophomore year, but if memory serves that's when he had his first bypass surgery. He didn't teach that semester, but he was back on campus before anyone thought humanly possible.
Steve was a techno-optimist, while I was a techno-pessimist. I remember a talk from my student days about using technology to track people. Steve saw parents being reunited with lost children; I saw Big Brother. 1984 (the book) was a big deal in 1980's. And speaking of 1984, that's the year I had put all my eggs in one basket assuming I would get a summer research position. I didn't. That sent me scrambling to make new plans. Br. Daniel and Caroline wanted me to work at La Salle's Art Museum, and I was trying to arrange to sleep on someone's couch at an affordable rate. Then Steve made me an offer I couldn't refuse: a room in his house — with a bed — for free. Who does that under normal circumstances? Steve and Janice took me in when Amelia was just six months old. If I paid any rent, it was pushing a teething Amelia around the block in a carriage, mowing the lawn, and putting address labels on PACS publications. I spent the following summer again at the Art Museum and with the Longo's before heading to graduate school.
In the years that followed, graduate school and three post-doctoral positions, vacations were always split between Pottsville (my hometown) and Philadelphia — staying with the Longo's of course. Those days I found myself using the term “home” to refer to my apartment, my parents' house, or the Longo's.
One story Steve liked to tell was that his son Stevie, a youngster at the time, was outside bragging about how great his father was, and when asked where his father was now, Stevie's answer was “watching wrestling.” Another repeated tale involved him and Hank commenting on very short man in a very big cowboy hat who was wandering around Holroyd Hall — they were wondering just who this guy was. The answer came from Norma (Steve's secretary at the time) informing them that that guy was her husband. One more story Steve often told was from when he was teaching an evening course on Digital Electronics to teachers. Steve was enthusing over some topic and asked, wouldn't the teachers' students love this. One responded with a story about a student whose father had raped her. I think Steve's repeating this story was his way of keeping himself humble and reminding himself that students had lives (sometimes tragic ones) outside the classroom.
A few other stories were at least half brags. In high school or early college, he had to give a speech and he chose the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle for his topic. He could still rattle off the beginning of his memorized spiel. He seemed to know that it was a terrible talk, but it was an impressive topic for someone that age. (I don't know how he was graded on that speech, but I recall he had a running joke with John Keenan that he deserved a better grade in his writing course.) While in graduate school or soon thereafter, Steve was invited to a prestigious summer school on high energy physics. His mother was disappointed to learn that Steve had to attend summer school. Many a time when a student gave a capstone presentation, Steve would talk about defending his dissertation. His advisor asked if the technique Steve presented could do anything more than the more established approach. After a few agonizing moments, Steve answered that no he couldn't think of anything. “I couldn't either” was his advisor's reply. And with that he was awarded his Ph.D.
Steve was La Salle's principal technology evangelist — particularly on the academic side. Even Caroline Wistar (queen of the Luddites) uses email and Google, and that can be traced back to Steve's training sessions, workshops, and brown-bag lunch talks. Steve completely embraced the idea that technology is ever advancing, and he was determined to keep up with it. Even when he'd settle down in the evening to watch a movie, he'd be flipping through some book with a title like “The Visual Basic Bible.” They were minimally two inches thick, and you could find something underlined or highlighted on page 567. When Steve told me he couldn't make sense of the movie Mulholland Drive, I figured it was just because he did not give the movie his full attention. But I owed him an apology because I later watched that movie and it went bat-shit crazy in the blink of an eye.
In my post-doc days, the Longo's and I had some fortuitous path crossings. My first post-doctoral position was at Pitt, and Steve's daughter Rachael was there at the time. That was also the time period in which I became Gabrielle's godfather. My third post-doctoral position was at the University of Virginia, and Steve's nephew/cousin? David was there at the time.
Steve and I often had what I refer to as “caveman conversations.” I swear one phone conversation went like this:
Tom: Hello Steve: Me. Eat? Tom: Yeah.
My job interview was similar:
Steve: Do you know C? Tom: No. Steve: Would you like to teach it? Tom: Maybe.
It was definitely a "who you know not what you know" story. And I had the good fortune of knowing Steve (and Linda Elliott). Someone they had hired wrote in the middle of the summer to say “never mind,” and I was the one-year replacement. That was about 25 years ago. I had taken some computer courses. I was proud that I had learned Fortran on punch cards, while Steve was equally proud that he never used a punch card. I also had courses in Basic, Pascal (with Linda), assembly, digital electronics, and microprocessors (the last three with Steve). My computer-science education and my maverick teaching style are mainly due to Steve. I would head to his house on a weekend. I might help him clean his basement workshop in exchange for him fleshing out the Internet protocol I was to teach later that week — my unskilled labor in exchange for his expertise — and I usually got a meal out of it as well.
In my first few years back at La Salle, I managed to contract pneumonia and ended up in the Emergency Room twice — taken both times by Steve and taken both times to his house afterward. It is also where I went after my cancer surgery. I did end up going with him to the ER twice, so that “debt” got repaid. Both of those involved ambulance rides. You know if someone as cheap as Steve was willing to take an ambulance, he had to be very sick and very scared. The first trip was while I was pledging a fraternity (pledging a fraternity at 50 weird, I know). I was letting some artificial process unnerve me, but when the Steve situation arose, I became immediately calm. I had to take care of the situation — at least until Janice arrived.
I was invited to countless Longo family events: dinners, movies, school skit nights, concerts, amusement parks, and so on. I begged off attending Foster's Rock School shows after some group (not Foster's) literally hurt my ears though I stood at the farthest wall. And as for amusement parks, I was the only one applying sun block and the only one getting burnt. Also, I think I suffered brain damage from some ride that looked like it was for ten-year-olds.
Steve was “old school.” He would give a challenging test, and if he needed to curve it, then so be it. That was the tradition in the hard sciences for years, but the practice became increasingly frowned upon. For a couple of years, Steve and I taught a Visual Basic course together. Some of the projects by our sophomores and juniors outshone the projects from the senior course at the time. Why? Because our better students rose to the challenge Steve set.
Another way in which Steve was old-fashioned is that he did not always choose his words with care. He might call Dave Falcone a “hippie,” but I can tell you those two had many long discussions on various faculty issues. They argued, they listened — and always on good terms. There was much respect, nay, even love there. These days I think Steve would get called in and have fingers wagged at him — there is a prejudice of prejudice, I think. I am at the end of the Baby Boomers, on the cusp if you will, so I have a tolerance for poor word choice if it is accompanied by open, meaningful debate and respect — and with Steve, I feel it was.
My first phone that didn't plug into the wall was a flip phone that Steve gave me when Amelia left the family plan. The better to track me with — he did have an amazing ability to call when I was out of the office. My second phone, a smart phone this time, came when no one else needed the upgrade. Our salesperson was probably non-binary (though I'm sure neither of us knew that term at the time). As old-fashioned as Steve could seem, I was proud of him when he made it a point to track down a manager to complain that another salesperson had been disrespectful to ours.
Sometime during the month, he would announce what I owed him for my part of the family plan. He always wanted to explain his calculation. The only one who used less data than me was him. His announcement would usually be first thing in the morning as I usually stopped at his office before going to my own. If I owed Steve $38, I could not give him $40. He'd start to shake and cough. Even though I owed him for way more than that. Maybe once he owed me $5 for a whole day. Steve was funny about money. Proud of being cheap. He never could understand why I might pay anything more than $20 for a painting.
One way I was allowed to pay Steve back was to deliver a child (Foster or Gabe) to or from Ancillae-Assumpta Academy. It was easy enough but sometimes awkward when other students' parents assumed I was a pedophile.
There are a number of other random things Steve would do for me. For example, before I had a car, he would take me along when he took his aunt and uncle grocery shopping. It was unfair, they were highly organized and divided the labor (tag-team shopping). I went up and down the aisles as quickly as I could, and still I was the last one done. And when I had enough hair to bother, Steve would take me to his barber. Growing up, my hometown barber had Sports Illustrated and Playboys; I felt so awkward there. With Steve, I was comfortable; the price was right; and we might hit the nearby Boston Market before or after.
While Steve did desk work most of his life, he had great admiration for people who worked with their hands and with tools. He thrilled to conversations about replacing something in the kitchen or snaking a drain. And if Mike the contractor stopped by at lunch, all other conversation just stopped dead. Listening to Mike talk about his projects or advising Steve on one of his home projects was crack for Steve. I did help Steve put in a wooden floor (two actually), but my job was to sort the boards by size and hand them to Steve. I stayed away from the saw and nail gun.
One long-term project that Steve and I worked on together was CAPP, which showed what a student had taken and what needed to be taken to complete a degree. Such customized projects are very poo-pooed these days, and frankly I was glad to get out of the business before a new curriculum came along. However, I thought we had produced a very good product that saved a lot of people a lot of time. And I got to work with Steve. In our division of labor, he coded the interface, and I met with chairs, assistant deans and registrars, and we met somewhere in the backend (database). Steve obsessed on CAPP's efficiency, bragging to me where he had shaved off a few microseconds. I didn't always put much stock in his efforts — that is, until I started advising students with CAPP's replacement, groaning as I waited for it to load and to respond. Once again Steve was right.
When I bought a house, Steve was there for the initial walk through and for the inspection, and he helped me buy my refrigerator. Peggy came with me for the closing; Steve might have been teaching that morning. But as soon as the house was mine, Steve took me to the Home Depot House to purchase new locks and two barrel-slide bolts (I think? I looked it up, Steve would be mad if I used the wrong term). One slide bolt for each back door, they are very utilitarian, very industrial, nothing decorative about them. They remind me that Steve didn't care much how things looked but cared very much that I was safe. He gave me a toolkit, and one day he brought by a ladder (I paid him for that). I am not very handy, but what I have gotten done is because Steve helped me (as with my towel racks and toilet paper holders) or supplied me with the necessary tools. I wish I had bought the house earlier, then there would have been more time for him to teach me such things.
The last few years have been tough. Steve did not relax into retirement. I wanted him to read mystery novels, but Steve would read about Quantum Field Theory. And then, the dementia crept in. I was instructed to go along with whatever scenario was presented. Yet detecting the delusion de jour was sometimes difficult. Were we in high school? Were we at Notre Dame? (And when he started going on about basketball, I just told him he was talking to the wrong Tom.) But more often it was a more familiar situation — something about teaching at La Salle. No, I didn't know his fall schedule off the top of my head. Yes, I could proctor that exam for him. He had dedicated his life to the place, so it's little wonder that that's where his mind went.
But overall, Steve's is not a sad story. He had a long, productive life. Janice and his doctors helped him defy the odds for years. Two bypasses, a-fib, blood cancer — it was quite a balancing act. It is unfortunate that Steve missed all the hoopla on artificial intelligence. I would be interested in his perspective. My worry is that people will increasingly neglect their own intelligence. If you share my worry, do what Steve would do: push yourself a little harder, learn something new, and listen to someone you disagree with.