from Jon Larson:

     I remember Steve from our Yale crew days on the Housatonic.  Then I met up with him again in Honolulu.  He was in the U.S. Navy at the time training and sailing out of Pearl Harbor and living in a big bachelor home he rented with a group of men in Manoa Valley near where Karen and I lived.  My last physical memory of Steve was he and Toby Welo and I playing golf at the Barbers Point Naval Air Station golf course, a great afternoon of fun in the sun shared between good Yale "buds" as we riffed between strokes about our life achievements (past and planned) and anticipated with some trepidation the coming Vietnam War and how it would affect each of our lives.   Steve had a beautiful wife Barbara and family.  He was a lanky tall, handsome guy.  He made contributions to Yale heading up the recruitment program in Atlanta (read his piece in the Yale 50th Class Book).  Steve's passing is another not so gentle reminder to us all that each day is a gift to be enjoyed.   I miss Steve and his passing is noted with sorrow at another good man leaving  this good life on earth too early and before his time.

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A Tribute to Steve Parker from the Yale Undergraduate Admissions Office

By Mark Dunn, Yale Class of 2007, Associate Director of Admissions                         

For more than 50 years Steve was a proud alumnus of Yale. And for nearly 20 of those years, Steve was a member of the Yale Admissions Office’s Alumni Schools Committee, which enlists alumni volunteers to interview high school students applying to Yale College. Since 2000 Steve served as Director of the Atlanta Committee, dedicating hundreds of hours of volunteer work to the program. There is only one appropriate word to describe Steve’s service, leadership, and dedication to this work: extraordinary.

To understand just how extraordinary Steve was in his role, it may be helpful to know what an ordinary director does. An ordinary director is responsible for communicating with about 25 volunteers who will interview fewer than 100 applicants a year. Steve managed a group of almost 250 volunteers and an area with more than 600 applicants, by far the largest Yale Alumni Schools Committee group in the world (lovingly nicknamed “The Pride of the South” in New Haven). An ordinary director would complain that the number of applications was outpacing the number of volunteers. Steve relentlessly sought out new volunteers and encouraged them to join in the work he found so valuable. An ordinary director assigns interviewers to applicants and is done. Steve wouldn’t rest until he had ensured that every single interview was completed – and if you were a new volunteer who thought you could get away with dropping the ball on an applicant or two, Steve would correct your thinking quickly!

An ordinary director communicates with the Admissions Office once or twice a year. Steve kept in touch on a weekly basis - always to ask what more he could do for the office and for the applicants. An ordinary director might make a brief appearance when an admissions office representative gave a presentation for local high school students and parents. Steve arrived 30 minutes early to every presentation to greet the crowd. He’d sit in the audience through the entire 90 minute talk (loving every minute of it, even though he had heard the same stories and bad jokes dozens of time). He’d proudly take the stage to talk about the interviewing program, calming the audience’s fears about what it’s like to be interviewed for Yale, and assuring them that his volunteers were a student’s best advocate. His obvious joy for the work, and his signature smile, made everyone in the room smile right back at him every time. And when the presentation was over he’d stick around for another 30 minutes answering questions from anyone and everyone who’d made it there.

Most importantly, Steve’s service as a Director was extraordinary because he knew whom he was really serving: not Yale, and not the admissions office, but his local community: the diverse group of bright, ambitious, deserving students who had gotten the crazy idea in their head that they might want to go to college 1,000 miles away at one of the best universities in the world. Steve cared deeply about these students, their families, their teachers and counselors.

Steve and Barbara hosted an annual “truce dinner” at their home, an ingenious event that brought together a Yale admissions representative and a Harvard admissions representative, who would declare a one-night truce in the name of educating local guidance counselors from every imaginable type of high school about selective college admissions. Steve hosted two receptions every year for admitted students and their families. Most probably didn’t know what to expect when pulling up to his beautiful house, but in an instant he made them feel welcome and at ease. Like that beautiful house, which Steve and Barbara so frequently filled with visitors, Yale might seem intimidating from the outside, but Steve made it his mission to make the university feel as warm and friendly as he was.

A little more than twelve years ago I was one of those students who felt more than a little intimidated walking up that driveway. I was 17, had only ever spent a couple hours on Yale’s campus, and was starting to wonder what I had gotten myself into. As soon as I got inside and met Steve, I knew I was headed to the right place. Steve and the other alumni in attendance were bright and funny, friendly and humble, excited and full of life. Steve had hired a Yale a cappella group that was in town to perform just for us. The food was amazing. Over the next twelve years, I had the time of my life at Yale, I joined an a cappella group myself, I started my first job at the admissions office, and I walked up that driveway many more times. Every time the feeling inside that house was the same. It was the same feeling Steve wanted to make sure every applicant, parent, counselor, and volunteer received: you are welcome here; you are valuable; you can do something great.

In every way imaginable way Steve was extraordinary. And whenever you spent time with Steve, he made you feel a little extraordinary too.

For his years of service to Yale, to the Undergraduate Admissions Office, and, most importantly, to the thousands of young people Steve touched, the entire Yale community expresses our greatest and most sincere appreciation to a truly extraordinary Eli.

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from George Johnson and Nelson Luria:

Stephen B. Parker died on April 23 after a short illness from brain cancer. He spent four years on the lightweight crew, was a member of Berzelius, Zeta Psi, and one of the 16-member senior assemblage that sprawled across two entries in TD. 

After the Navy and a Northwestern MBA, he settled in Minneapolis for 27 years, then in Atlanta for the next 20 until his death.  Steve showed great entrepreneurial talent. After two years at 3M, he owned and managed two successful placement firms and an equipment rental business. In the mid-1970’s, he founded NASDAQ traded Computer Depot, which, under his leadership, reached  $100 million in sales of IBM PCs and related products at leased spaces at department stores .

When other computer manufacturers with other distribution channels caused the company’s demise, he opened the Minneapolis office of Russell Reynolds Associates, which became that executive placement firm’s number one office.  He later founded Converge Search in Atlanta.  In Minneapolis he served on the Board of Breck School (Episcopal)  at a crucial time when the school moved and purchased a new campus. 

His service to Yale was evident, not only as President of the Yale Club of Georgia but also as Chair of the Atlanta Yale Alumni Schools Committee which during his tenure (2000-2015) became the largest ASC in the world.  Steve’s son, Harrison, played the bagpipes at our 50th Reunion Battell Chapel Memorial service.  Steve’s life was celebrated by friends and family both at a funeral service at the Cathedral Church of St. Philip, Atlanta, and at a memorial gathering at the Minikahda Club, Minneapolis. George Johnson was among those in Minneapolis and said perhaps for many of us who knew Steve: “Our friendship was a special part of my younger life.” 

Steve is survived by his wife, Barbara Long, and children, Emily, Anne ’94, Baillie, Katy Long and Harrison.

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