{"id":2337,"date":"2014-08-01T11:24:00","date_gmt":"2014-08-01T11:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/?p=2337"},"modified":"2014-10-21T16:15:50","modified_gmt":"2014-10-21T16:15:50","slug":"steeg-knew-the-human-heart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/2014\/08\/01\/steeg-knew-the-human-heart\/","title":{"rendered":"Steeg Knew the Human Heart"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steve Charles<\/em>\u2014Ted Steeg \u201952 once told me, \u201cIf you have a workable and consistent perception of what is in the human heart, you can communicate with anyone, any time, anywhere, through any medium.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"STEEG-obit-master675\"<\/a> Ted, who died July 7, had that \u201cworkable and consistent perception\u201d and practiced it most famously in film. His documentary about Wabash, A Way of Life,<\/i> captures \u201cthe human heart\u201d of Wabash like no other project I\u2019ve seen in any medium. In it we meet Wabash legends like Eric Dean, Fred Enenbach, Vic Powell, and Eliot Williams. We sit on the College mall and listen as President Thad Seymour delights upperclassmen with awful poetry during the infamous Elmore Day, then we watch him welcome with sincerity the new class on Freshman Saturday. And we see Doc Keith Baird \u201956, fresh from his work on Apollo 13. It\u2019s like watching your family\u2019s best lost home movies; that is, if Steven Spielberg was the one in your family who liked to play with the camera.<\/p>\n

Ted wrote: “What I was really trying to do with the whole film was not just make audiences hear and see what’s great about amazing Wabash, but also feel it.”\u00a0Watch A Way of Life<\/em>\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0on the College\u2019s YouTube channel and you can feel it, too.<\/p>\n

But Ted\u2019s strongest medium was face-to-face. He lived \u201cin the moment\u201d all his life and long before the phrase became fashionable. He understood the power (though I can\u2019t imagine him using the term) of simply being present. His friend Dan Wakefield recalls in Creating from the Spirit<\/i> the day he began expounding to Ted the virtues he found as a beginning yoga student:<\/p>\n

At first I thought he was trying to joke away my enthusiasm for living in the moment and shutting off the noise that the yoga postures provided. But that wasn\u2019t it.<\/i><\/p>\n

<\/i>\u201cYou yo-yo. Why do you think I\u2019ve been playing sports all these years?\u201d Ted challenged. \u201cThat\u2019s what sports does\u2014puts you in the moment and shuts down the mental noise.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

Ted and I exchanged many emails and collaborated on several projects, but I recall his presence most keenly from an hour-long conversation we had at Crawfordsville\u2019s Holiday Inn in the late 1990s. Ted had been in town for the first meeting of Wabash Magazine\u2019s <\/i>editorial advisory board. He offered to meet me for breakfast and talk some more. He was one of those people who put you at ease and, in that relaxed moment, the conversation and creativity flowed. I left feeling affirmed, inspired, and freed to think in new ways about our work here. And with two of the best ideas we\u2019ve ever had for the magazine and which still guide us today.<\/p>\n

The poet William Stafford wrote, \u201cI\u2019m saved in this world by unforeseen friends,\u201d and Ted Steeg was one of those friends for many, and certainly for me, for Wabash Magazine,<\/i> and my vocation here. His presence will be missed by many, especially by his daughter, Amy, his grandchildren, and friends like Wakefield, who in a tribute in NUVO Magazine<\/i> wrote, \u201cTed was known to us as \u2018The Horse\u2019\u2014a nickname that meant someone who was strong\u2014the one you could count on, the one who could carry the load and never complain.\u201d<\/p>\n

Watch Ted\u2019s A Way of Life <\/a>on the College\u2019s YouTube channel.<\/p>\n

Ted reflects about making<\/a> A Way of Life.<\/p>\n

Read Dan Wakefield\u2019s tribute<\/a> in NUVO magazine.<\/p>\n

Steeg discusses the most significant event of the 20th century in filmmaking<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steve Charles\u2014Ted Steeg \u201952 once told me, \u201cIf you have a workable and consistent perception of what is in the human heart, you can communicate with anyone, any time, anywhere, through any […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"w_featured_image_url":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2014\/08\/STEEG-obit-master675.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2337"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2345,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2337\/revisions\/2345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}