STEVE WATERMAN

I was born in Madison, Wisconsin July 16, 1941. My father’s name was Jess; my mother’s name was Barbara. At that time Dad worked as a baggage man on the Chicago Northwestern running from Madison to Chicago. He became seriously ill in 1944 and we moved to Mauston, Wisconsin in 1945, into the home my mother had inherited from her father. As an aside, her father had died in 1925. That was the last grandparent so I didn’t know any of my grandparents.

My father continued working for maybe another four to five years. He had to leave his job about 1950. He had what I think today we would call Alzheimer's disease. In 1950 it was known as hardening of the arteries to the brain. About 1954 he went to a nursing home and died in the fall of 1957. At that time he was 69. I was a junior in high school and my younger brother Peter was a freshman.

My father and mother had been married in Dubuque, Iowa in 1940 when he was 52 and she was 36. It was his second marriage and her first. His first wife had died in about 1929 after my half-brother, Sherwood, was born in about 1925. My mother had been a school teacher in various communities in Wisconsin, the last ten years or so in Lake Geneva. She left that job after meeting and marrying my father.

With my father’s illness in the early 1950’s it was important for my mother to return to a teaching job. She started teaching in Mauston in 1954 and held that job until retirement in 1969. She died in a nursing home in Mauston at the age of 90 in September, 1994. My brother still lives in our family home in Mauston.

My father was literally a doorstep baby. His mother and her husband had four children in fairly rapid succession and the father left, never to be heard from again. His mother couldn’t handle the four kids and she literally dropped them on the doorstep of an orphanage and left. The four were then adopted and my father was 37 years old before he put his family together. He was adopted by a Waterman family in New Lisbon, Wisconsin. We found out later that our real name should be Wood instead of Waterman.

My mother was one of three girls born to an attorney who practiced law with his father in Mauston. He received a law degree at American University in Washington, D.C. while working as an aide for Senator Babcock of Wisconsin. I have a series of letters that he wrote to his wife in Mauston from Washington. This chain of professional people would make me a fourth generation college graduate.

I was the man of the family from the time I was about a freshman in high school, with a little brother I felt I had to protect in various instances and a mother who was struggling to make ends meet. We were living on a meager retirement from my father’s previous employment. Our 1939 automobile was in continual disrepair. Social gatherings were limited to family and very close friends and childhood entertainment was through school and parks and recreation activities. Through it all my mother never let us feel like we were poor.

I graduated from high school in Mauston in 1959. I enrolled in the University of Wisconsin at Madison in business; but decided to go into education during my sophomore year and transferred to the University of Wisconsin at Steven’s Point. I graduated nom there in 1964 and have taught, coached, counseled, been a principal, athletic director and superintendent since then. From 1964 until the present I have had positions in Ithaca and Richland Center High Schools in Wisconsin; in Muscatine, Lamoni, Mediapolis and Clarke Community Schools in Iowa. 

Carole Abernathy and I met on a blind date. Her hair dresser was married to my assistant football coach. She was teaching at Richland Community College in Richland Center, Wisconsin, and I was teaching and coaching at a high school seven miles from there. We were married August 4, 1968 in Omaha.

Carole has taught in various colleges throughout our marriage and has taught one year in high school during that time. She was a tenured faculty member at Iowa Wesleyan College in Mount Pleasant, Iowa. She presently is an instructor at Graceland College in Lamoni.

I have been blessed with a wonderful wife and lovely family. Carole and I have three children: Julie was born September, 1969; Mike, August 1972, and Andy in Dec. 1974.

Julie is married to Phil Stein. She is an elementary guidance counselor in Mallard and West Bend. She graduated from the University of Northern Iowa with a Bachelor's degree in Elementary Education and from Morningside College with a Master's degree in Counselor Education. She and Phil are the parents of our first and only grandchild.

Mike is a graduate of West Point Military Academy in New York. He presently is part of Operation Joint Endeavor. His base is Germany but his service is on the Hungarian/Croatian border.

Andy is a senior at Coe College, Cedar Rapids with a Political Science major. Neither of the boys are married.

I was confirmed a Methodist on Easter, 1954, have remained loyal to and been active in the United Methodist Church ever since, teaching and being Superintendent of Sunday School, acting on a Board of Trustees and presently Carole and I are Lay Leaders of the Osceola United Methodist church.

Additionally I have served on a YMCA Board of Directors, managed Little League baseball, have been a member of Lion’s Club and of Rotary since 1993. I am pleased that I will serve as Rotary president from July 1, 1996 through June 30, 1997.

I have ridden in RAGBRAI (The Register’s Great Bike Ride Across Iowa) three years. I enjoy card playing and golf. I would describe myself as a fiscal conservative and social liberal. This causes for many interesting discussion with friends who think I should be conservative on all issues and others who think I should be liberal on all issues.

Because the title of the book is "Recipes for Living" I guess part of my recipe is that I had to take responsibility very early out of necessity and would encourage parents to give young people opportunities for taking responsibility at a young age.

The second recipe: I had a God-fearing mother who was a lifelong Methodist- Episcopalian who, coupled with her Christian beliefs, tried to make a level playing field for all issues. She insisted on it in her classroom and insisted on honesty in all she came in contact with. One of my early remembrances of this was illustrated during the dark days in America when Joe McCarthy was accusing innocent people of being Communists. Joe McCarthy represented Wisconsin in the U.S. Senate and by this time had become not only a state disgrace but a national disgrace. There was a movement, "Joe must go",  to recall him. Mother signed the petition as rapidly as possible and explained the issues to her two young sons.

A third recipe is what a friend of mine called “being able to swim in many waters." That expression to him meant being able to communicate, enjoy the fellowship of and relate to people of any color skin, any station in life, either gender or any age.

The fourth recipe is one that we hear every day from all kinds of people: work hard at what you are doing as cheerfully as possible, relate to those you work with, and get the job done.

The fifth recipe is Biblical: From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded (Luke 12:48). This has been the topic of some speeches I have given to service groups and young people. I remember giving this speech to some high school honor students in eastern Iowa and I got more compliments on it than was usual. I didn’t think it was that good but the message seems to hit home, and I think the people who have had the joy of helping others understand what that passage means.

The sixth recipe: In every community where I’ve lived naysayers have approached me saying, "This is an unfriendly town." Yet I have never found any of the communities we have ever lived in to be unfriendly. I have found that it is important whether just moving into a community or living there for a long time to attempt to meet and greet people more than half-way. Almost everyone will walk toward you if you have that attitude, Carole and I have sought out the United Methodist Churches in the communities we have lived in. As we got to know the people the churches proved to be safety nets and a place of friendship almost from the day we moved in.

He has told you, O mortal what is good;
and what dues the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
(Micah 6:8)

Return to main page for Recipes for Living 1996 by Fern Underwood

Last Revised April 29, 2012