Steven Pope ’63

A remembrance by Tom “Cue” MillerI rolled out of bed one August morning in 2002 and drove the New Jersey Turnpike to Jon Perlman’s house in Princeton. We would proceed to Baltimore for a last visit to our old friend, Steve Pope.I got to Perlman’s just in time to get a phone call. We were too late. Steve had gone to the hospital and died minutes earlier of metastatic melanoma, which, despite a previous operation to remove a brain tumor, had relentlessly returned.Jon and I drove around rural New Jersey much of the rest of the day. The weather could not have been nicer; our mood could not have been more melancholy. We thought about Steve, we talked a little about Steve; we talked and thought about life, about ourselves. It was a sad, beautiful day.At Carleton, years before, Steve and I shared an interest in left-leaning politics—and many other things far less fraught. Steve talked about joining the Young Socialist Alliance. Both of us were early critics of the Vietnam War.After Carleton I moved to Boston, got married, moved to New York City. I went to work for a book publisher. I went on anti-war demonstrations. I went to grad school at night, and became an ad hoc draft-avoidance expert. Steve, to my astonishment, joined the U.S. Coast Guard and wrote that he had gone to officer’s candidate school.By 1965 he had volunteered for Vietnam, commanding a Coast Guard version of a small boat later called “Swift Boats,” patrolling rivers and shoreline. It was inconceivable to me that he was doing this. In a letter, Pope casually explained his mission as “stopping sampans, looking vainly for guns, and handing out Hershey bars,” a self-deprecating description I didn’t believe even at the time.Despite the chaos of war, his Southeast Asia experience fed a long interest in Eastern culture and religion. Returning to the United States, he popped up in my life again: he living part-time in Coast Guard BOQ’s on Governor’s Island off Manhattan’s tip and commuting to a row house he rehabbed in Philadelphia, me living at the other end of Manhattan in Washington Heights. He came by for dinners, events, even joined us in anti-war demonstrations, occasionally in uniform. It was the old Steve, a calm man of minimal drama and few words, but much curiosity and amazing activity.After his discharge in 1968, Pope pursued in earnest an interest in Zen Buddhism. He took formal training at the Easton Zen Center in Easton, Pennsylvania that led to becoming a Buddhist monk in 1970. Several of us went to his ordination. I was baffled again. He was a monk, but he had a girlfriend (he soon married her). Socialist, military officer, Buddhist?He and his bride moved to Massachusetts, seeking to start a Zen temple. Then … nothing for many years. They returned to Philadelphia, where Steve received an AA degree in computer science, then on to Wisconsin, I learned later. They started a family. He worked in a shipyard as a pipe-fitter, then at a company that converted satellite pictures to CAD files. In 1991, he and his wife divorced. Steve took a job as a network guru in Baltimore and within two years married Diana Spies, a childhood friend.In the early 1990s, armed with a new computer, the internet, email, and no small dose of nostalgia, I began seeking old Carleton friends in the ether. One by one, they emerged. Steve Stigler was first, and others soon followed, among them the recently deceased (and much missed) Dick (Rick) Collier, Bill Hagquist, Bruce Carlson, Bob Miller, Jon Perlman, Jeff Berger … and Steve Pope. As time passed, our growing group not only communicated by email, but had occasional in-person get-togethers. Twice we met in Baltimore at Steve and Diana’s. At a party, Steve introduced us to the music of Seka Genta Semara, a Balinese gamelan, a group he and Diana belonged to that played traditional Balinese musical instruments.That was to be my last personal visit. He had survived his operation by then and was optimistic for his future. The email group followed his recovery closely. He was back at work, practiced tai chi regularly to maintain his fitness. He had been studying shiatsu massage for several years, was taking courses in anatomy and physiology just for the hell of it. Time passed; then the cancer returned.I wrote an obituary for Diana, which appeared in modified form in the Baltimore Sun. My wife and I drove to Downingtown, Pennsylvania, for his memorial service at a Quaker meeting house where Diana was a member. His grown children were there, along with Coast Guard members in uniform, co-workers, old friends. Several of us from the Carleton email group were there, and when I rose to say a few words, tears welled up in my eyes.That last day at Jon’s house in New Jersey, when our planned visit was abruptly curtailed, I had spoken with Diana on the phone. “We went to the hospital,” she said. “We talked for a while and then he looked up at me. ‘I think I’ll go to sleep now,’ he said.” That was all.