Member of the Month - January 2018 - Sagebrush Steve

[Kane]

The clock has run out on the excellent 2017 year here on TFF. Now is the time the xmas decorations *should* be taken down, but perhaps some are nursing some post-festivity headaches. But a whole new year coincides with a whole new month, and so it is time to announce our new Member of the Month!

 

By unanimous staff vote, we are happy to declare that January's Member of the Month is ...

 

 

         SAGEBRUSH STEVE        

Steve is one of those people who has switched gears a lot in his life, and accumulated a lot of skills and talents along the way. From helping his mother to make jewellery as a youngster to pay for school, studying engineering, running an IT company, to now being a consultant and writing books on the great outdoors, Steve has certainly packed a lot into his life. But if there was one continuous thread in Steve's life, it might be his passion for fossils - something that has stuck by him since sixth grade and seems to have returned with a real force and vigor.   

 

Around here, most of our members know Steve for his helpful posts, his mad / precise engineering skills in the design and building of display cabinets, and his general goodwill, camaraderie, and encouragement of other members on the forum. He is just an all-round good guy, and we're glad to have him with us.  

 

Sagebrush Steve -  Thanks for all you do and contribute here on the Forum!

Congratulations Sir! Wear this Crown with joy as you earned it!

 

Care to tell us about your journey here to the Fossil Forum ?  This is your opportunity to tell us about your fossil journey (and you can even talk about engineering... at least to me as I promise I won't fall asleep or run away!).

 

On behalf of the staff here on TFF, congratulations! 

[ynot]

Congratulations Steve!!

 

Thanks for Your contributions!

[sixgill pete]

Congratulations Steve. 

[Miocene_Mason]

Congrats Steve! 

[Bobby Rico]

Congratulations very well deserved  

[Tidgy's Dad]

CONGRATULATIONS, Steve ! ! ! 

Love your posts, a well deserved win!  

Yaaaaaaayyyyyyy!!!!!!!!!!!!

[JohnJ]

Congratulations Steve.

[Troodon]

Congratulations  Steve

[old bones]

Congratulations, Steve!

[Macrophyseter]

Steve, Congrats! 

[PFOOLEY]

Good work, S.Steve...congrats on a well deserved honor.

[Fossildude19]

Well deserved, Steve! Congratulations, and thanks for your contributions.  

[Pagurus]

 

Congratulations, well-deserved!  I greatly appreciate all you bring to this great forum. Thanks!

[Sagebrush Steve]

Wow! I'm honored and amazed, especially since I'm nowhere near an expert on identifying fossils.  But I'm learning a lot from TFF!  Bear with me while I recover from a night of partying (I managed to stay up until almost 10:30 last night before falling fast asleep) and I will write another post filling you in on my journey here.

[digit]

Huzzah! Congrats!

 

We'll wait till you clear the cobwebs and expect to hear a great backstory.

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

[Kane]

25 minutes ago, Sagebrush Steve said:

Wow! I'm honored and amazed, especially since I'm nowhere near an expert on identifying fossils.  But I'm learning a lot from TFF!  Bear with me while I recover from a night of partying (I managed to stay up until almost 10:30 last night before falling fast asleep) and I will write another post filling you in on my journey here.

A novice with exceptional forum citizenship is preferable to an expert with little regard for community, hands down.  No matter what our knowledge and skills in this passion of ours, we are all lifelong learners. 

 

Recover well, and we'll be here to read your story!  

[Coco]

Congrats Steve !

 

Coco

[jcbshark]

 Congrats and thanks for your participation in making TFF what it is

[izak_]

Congratulations Steve!! 

[Sagebrush Steve]

@Kane @ynot @sixgill pete @WhodamanHD @Bobby Rico @Tidgy's Dad @JohnJ @Troodon @old bones @Macrophyseter @PFOOLEY @Fossildude19 @Pagurus @digit @Coco @jcbshark @Foozil

 

First of all, thanks, everyone, for your kind words.  It’s good to know that you can make a contribution to the forum without being an expert on fossils.  (Though I will try to improve my skill at identifying fossils, and TFF is a great way to learn.)

 

My own journey into the world of fossils started at an early age by reading children’s books about dinosaurs.  Their influence made me decide to become a paleontologist when I grew up, a goal I maintained even after watching, at age 6, a late-night TV showing of the movie Godzilla.  It was an experience that gave me nightmares for years afterwards.  It helped that my parents were both avid rockhounds who belonged to a club in Southern California that would go out on desert expeditions nearly every weekend to places with exotic names like Afton Canyon, Wiley’s Well, or Amboy Crater.  I grew up wandering the desert looking for agates, petrified wood, rhodonite, geodes, chrysocolla, Apache tears, and just about any other rock or mineral you could imagine.

 

I tried to weave my interest in paleontology into my education whenever I could.  One notable event came when I was in 6th grade.  My older brother found a used copy of the 1945 edition of the college textbook, Vertebrate Paleontology, by Alfred S. Romer, and gave it to me.  (It was still the current edition at the time, giving you a hint at how old I might be…)  My teacher expected us to do book reports regularly, so I told him this was the book I wanted to read.  It took me several months to finish it, and it was by reading it that I learned there was much more to paleontology than dinosaurs—such things as jawless fishes, mammal-like reptiles, odd- and even-toed ungulates, and edentates—things I had never even dreamed of before.  When I submitted my report, my bewildered teacher gave me credit for reading 6 books.

 

In seventh grade we had to do a science project of our choosing.  Again focusing on paleontology but without a dinosaur to excavate nearby, I decided to improvise.  I had a pet rabbit that had died a few years before and was buried in our backyard, complete with tombstone.  With shovel in hand I dug her up (fortunately she was mostly just bones) and pieced her back together on a stand with a homemade wire frame.  She looked pretty pathetic but I won first prize.

 

When I went to high school, things changed.  To follow my chosen career path I would need to take a class on biology, but that class wasn’t open to freshmen.  So, my advisor put me into the only science class available to me, electronics.  It was an eye-opening experience and it wasn’t long before I changed my career goal to become an engineer.  I took electronics classes all 4 years of high school.  After the first year I knew more than my instructor did, so I ended up being a teaching assistant. 

 

I followed that with five years of college to pick up bachelors and masters degrees in electronic engineering.  By then my mother had bought a local lapidary and gift shop across from the pier in Redondo Beach.  She was a great sales person but not so interested in actually making the jewelry, so when I came home on weekends there would invariably be a stack of custom jewelry orders waiting for me to make.  I would occasionally cast wedding rings, and I trust there was no significance to the fact that the rings always seemed to last longer than the marriages.

 

After college it was out into the working world.  I started my career as an engineer at Hewlett-Packard, where I would remain for 25 years.  When HP split into two companies in 2000, my business became part of Agilent Technologies, where I remained for another 10 years before retiring in 2009.  Early in my career I realized I was a lot better at managing engineers than I was at doing engineering work, so I moved into management.  Over the years I took on more and more responsibility until at the time of my retirement I was managing a division-size business.

 

One of the things about being an executive in the corporate world is that when you are not on an airplane flying to some exotic locale you are sitting at a desk or in a meeting.  I was missing the chance to get outdoors in the wilderness and I knew that needed to change.  I discussed it with my wife and we agreed the only way to make this happen was to give myself a challenge.  I decided to write a book about the state parks near where I live north of San Francisco.  (I knew what I was getting into because I had written a technical book about electronic technologies some years earlier.)  I would have to hike all the trails in the parks in order to write about them, which gave me the excuse to get out.  This book, Guide to State Parks of the Sonoma Coast and Russian River, came out in 1998, followed by a second edition, Hiking and Adventure Guide to the Sonoma Coast and Russian River, in 2010.  In between I wrote another book, Outdoor Navigation with GPS, now in its third edition.  In this book I used examples of navigating trails in remote places like Yosemite and Canyonlands National Parks, giving me yet another excuse to get outdoors into the wilderness.  And along the way I could stop at places like the Green River in Wyoming to dig for fossil fish or the Wheeler Range in Utah to dig for trilobites and reasonably justify them as research for writing my GPS book.

 

After retiring from Agilent Technologies, I wasn’t quite ready to be fully retired.  My wife and I opened our own IT company in 2010, growing it for over 5 years before selling it at the end of 2015 and being fully retired.  I still do some IT consulting but I have made it a point to get out and dig for fossils whenever I can (not easy in Sonoma County, which is mostly volcanic rock).  We were hampered for awhile because my wife had back surgery about a year ago, but after a lengthy recovery she is back to normal now.  We’ll try to get out more this spring, but there is a new factor.  My son lives in England with his English girlfriend.  They are getting married in Portugal this spring, which will be a wonderful experience not only for them but also for us as we have never been to Portugal before.  But it does eat up a fair amount of my travel budget for the year.  We have both made it a point to go to the Tucson Fossil Show in a few weeks, though, and I’m surreptitiously planning out some other expeditions for later in the year.  With any luck I will be able to make good progress filling up my newly-made fossil cabinet before the end of 2018.

 

Finally, you may ask, “What’s with the name ‘Sagebrush Steve’?”  Well, my favorite author is Edward Abbey (favorite author, not favorite person!), known to his few friends as “Cactus Ed.”  Since I love getting out into the desert I thought I’d follow his lead and go with “Sagebrush Steve.”

 

Thanks again for this honor, I wish you all a great 2018, and good hunting!

[GeschWhat]

Great story, Steve. Congratulations! I will be at the Tucson show, and I think there are a couple of other members who plan on attending as well. It would be fun to get a group together and meet up for a bite one day.

[Tidgy's Dad]

Lovely story, Steve, very interesting, you've clearly made a success of your life. 

I think the moniker "Sagebrush Steve" is great. 

Once again, congratulations! 

[digit]

Now that's a worthy story for this worthy honor. I love reading "origin stories" and seeing both the common threads that eventually bring us all to this forum as well as the unique sets of circumstances in everybody's back stories that comprise the patterned quilt of our diverse membership.

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

[abyssunder]

Congrats Steve! Most of us are not specialist in this domain, but a clear good thinking, ideas and experience might compensate that.

[Ludwigia]

Congratulations to you, Steve, for this well-deserved honor and thank you for your extremely interesting vita!