I think for many of us there is one person who was hugely important to us at a formative time in our lives. This may have been a teacher, a coach, a family member, or just anyone who came along at the right time. For me, that person was Maxine Steig, who I had for English in my freshman, junior, and senior years in high school. She was tremendously important to me. She made me feel that my weird interests were totally okay. For an Iowa farmboy in the 1950s, this was a big deal. _________________________________________________________

In 1959, the school in Nemaha (pop. 184 in 1950) that I’d attended for first grade through junior high, merged with the school in nearby Early, seven miles away. Mine would be the first graduating class of the newly-named Crestland High School. Even consolidated, this was a small school. There were thirty-two of us in my freshman class, which would be reduced to twenty-eight by the time we graduated (twenty-four boys and four girls, interesting ratio). For those of us coming from Nemaha, we had to get used to a new building, classrooms and classmates, and new teachers. Plus there was just the thing of now being in high school.

I’m in the last row, fifth from left.

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I don’t remember other classes and teachers in any detail, but Mrs. Steig entranced me from the beginning. I was surprised to find out only a few years ago that she was born and raised in Sac City, an Iowa town about ten or twelve miles southeast of Early. I think I had the idea that she’d come from some cosmopolitan place far beyond Iowa. She was funny, engaging, and quite special. She brought so much to us, such as the world of Charles Addams, The Catcher in the Rye, Broadway plays, and much, much more. I mean, what was she doing here?

I’d been intending to write something about Mrs. Steig for some time. Five years ago I exchanged emails about her with Gary Davis, a classmate I met in first grade in 1951 and have known ever since. Here’s what he wrote then:

Thoughts about Maxine Steig. She was from a Sac City family. She married Butch, whom she claimed, tried to run her over with a car more than once. She hated birds and claimed to speed up to hit them with her car. She wrote a cookbook about eating wildlife (including crows.) She lived in Storm Lake. She died young from meningitis. She led art discussions in her English classes. She agreed to read “From Here to Eternity” if we would read “Julius Caesar.” She loaned precious plays to Ted. She had a hearty laugh. She wore powerful perfume or body powder. She encouraged me to start reading classical philosophers and that turned out to be my major academic interest all the way to the Ph.D. level. When our classmate Maynard was summoned from class because his father had just committed suicide, she reminded us that Thoreau had written that “most men live lives of quiet desperation.”

And from another email from Gary:

I was telling somebody the other day about how Mrs. Steig collected play scripts and she enjoyed reading them the way other people would read a novel. She is the only person I’ve ever met who did that. There must be others but they probably didn’t live in Storm Lake. The bottom line for me is that she pushed me to reach higher and try harder. So did Dutch Bryan, Bill Hall and Slater Brockman. For living on the edge of the world, we had a pretty good bunch of teachers.

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I don’t remember Mrs. Steig loaning me copies of plays to read. Gary may be thinking of  the Charles Addams cartoon collections from The New Yorker that she brought to class. I don’t think I’d ever seen any of Addams’ work before, and probably hadn’t seen The New Yorker either. I was completely knocked out by the cartoons and hooked right into Adams’ sensibility. She loaned the books to me to take home, saying she’d never loaned them to anyone before. She knew I would appreciate them. Of course, that made me feel special.

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I found out early on that Mrs. Steig had known my mother and her two sisters and their mother in Storm Lake, a larger town north of Early where they grew up. Mrs. Steig also lived there. I don’t know or can’t remember how they met, but it felt like a connection with her my classmates didn’t have.

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In 1971, when I was back at the University of Iowa after four years in the Air Force, I got a call from my mom telling me that Mrs. Steig had died from while on a trip to California. Meningitis.  This was quite a jolt. She was still young, only 59. She was born Maxine Abernathy in 1911. I found out recently that her mother had died in 1918 at age 27, when Maxine was only 7. Something else I hadn’t known. She was an only child, like me. In retrospect, this feels like another connection, however tenuous.

*** Update – March 28, 2025. A few days ago, I heard from Mrs. Steig’s granddaughter, Beth, after she found this post online. She had one correction, which is that Mrs. Steig was not an only child, but had a sister, LaVon, who was six years younger.

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Mrs. Steig oversaw the high school newspaper, the Cadet Bugle, which appeared either weekly or every two weeks in the Early newspaper. Sometime early in my freshman year, Jean Miller, who was a sophomore and editor of the school paper, came to my desk in study hall to tell me Mrs. Steig thought I should be on the paper’s staff. This hadn’t occurred to me, but I thought, why not, I was always writing stuff anyway.

We’d work on the paper in Mrs. Steig’s office, which was just off the study hall. Her office became a space where some of us would go, ostensibly for the paper if anyone asked, but mainly to just hang out with her. She happily indulged us. I think she was engaged and stimulated by those of us she found interesting (I’m assuming), just as we were stimulated by her.

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I was on the school paper all four years, and took over as editor in my senior year, after Jean Miller graduated. I had a regular column I called “In My Opinion.” Yeah, okay, maybe a little presumptuous. Unfortunately, or perhaps not, none of these early journalistic efforts have survived.

Below, my first year on the paper, 1959. Mrs. Steig is standing in the center, looking on, while I’m third from right, staring right at the camera, not even pretending to look on like everyone else is.

Below is from 1962 during my tenure as editor. I’m at right, the only guy wearing a tie.

Below, also from 1962, a shot of me supposedly working on an editorial. No explanation for the shirt I’m wearing, but it must have seemed like a good idea at the time.

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Mrs. Steig told us that every Christmas she made dinner using the Cratchit’s dinner menu from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, as per the following:

Roast goose: The centerpiece of the meal, served with apple sauce and mashed potatoes.                                                                                                                                              Sage and onion stuffing: A flavorful addition to the goose.                                             Christmas pudding: A “speckled cannon ball” pudding that was hard and firm, and decorated with Christmas holly.                                                                                                  Gravy: Made in a saucepan ahead of time.

Per Wikipedia: The Cratchit family’s dinner is part of a vision that Scrooge has of what would have happened if he hadn’t changed his ways. Scrooge eventually does change his ways and sends the Cratchit’s a turkey as a gift.

I don’t know if Mrs. Steig went with the goose from Scrooge’s vision or opted for turkey. I also don’t know if she actually did this every year, or if it was just a story she liked to tell. Either way, it’s pretty cool.

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She told us her house in Storm Lake was haunted, that she’d hear noises. I can’t remember what else she said about how it was haunted, but she sounded quite serious. I was there several times over the years, but sadly, no such spectral evidence produced itself. Still, I’d like to think she could attract such paranormal happenings.

To follow up on Gary Davis’ earlier comment that Mrs. Steig collected and read play scripts, I can attest to the collecting part. One of the rooms in her home had built-in book shelves filled with published play scripts. Plus lots of books in general.

Haunted or not, her house, which was at 414 Terrace Street in Storm Lake, was nearly impossible to find. This may reflect more on my poor navigational skills than anything mysterious, but it seems somehow right that it wasn’t easy to get to.

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One day I brought in a Japanese bayonet that that my Uncle Russ had brought back from WWII, which had somehow ended up with my dad. Can’t remember if this was for something we were doing as a class, or if I just thought Mrs. Steig would get a kick out of seeing a bayonet. I pointed out oil residue still on the blade. She said she thought there was some blood as well. An example of her macabre humor.

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One of my strongest memories is when Mrs. Steig read J.D. Salingers’s The Catcher in the Rye aloud to us over several class periods. She read everything except the times Holden Caulfield sees “Fuck you” written on walls at his school. She’d get right up to it, then stop and say there was a word she wasn’t going to say. But she read everything else. In retrospect, this was a pretty edgy thing to do in the high school of a small town Iowa farming community in 1962. She also brought in art prints that she’d put on the walls. Some of these were nude studies. I’m sure all this contributed to her being “let go,” i.e. fired, a few years after I graduated. She must have known she was pushing limits, but that broadening our view of the world was worth the risk. Given the time and place and our circumstances, we weren’t likely to be exposed to stuff like this, at least, not in an academic setting. Of course, in today’s climate she’d probably get arrested for this kind of activity, or burned as a witch.

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The only time I can remember Mrs. Steig getting really angry with us was when the word “fairy” was said in whatever context, there would be giggling laughter like it was a big joke, mainly from the boys. I’m sure we had a vague idea of what it referred to, but we didn’t really know anything. It always triggered a strong response from her, and I’ve never forgotten that, either.

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It was only last week when I was looking through school yearbooks that I found something Mrs. Steig had written in mine in 1959 after my freshman year. I’d totally forgotten about this. It was on the very last page, just before the endpaper of the back cover. I’d normally be unlikely to see it, because everything else was before that. I know I must have seen it at the time, but there was something a little spooky about finding it just when I was about to start writing about her. I’m hesitant to include her message, since doing so might make it look it look like I’m bragging. Well, maybe I am, but I’m really happy that she would write this.

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I think Mrs. Steig was probably a better teacher for students she took a real interest in, who she felt would appreciate what she had to give us. I remember how devastated I was to learn that we wouldn’t have her for sophomore English. Instead, we were to have a Mrs. Alice Brown. She was doubtless competent and nice enough, but about as exciting as her name implies. That’s probably unfair, but I’d been so spoiled to have Mrs. Steig as a teacher, that it was hard to accept. She was exciting, and fun to be around, especially if she shined her light on you.

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She was one of two teachers who had the most influence on me. The other, interestingly enough, and for very different reasons, was Bill Hall. Mr. Hall was the high school principal. He also taught physics and algebra, but I never had any classes with him. Some time ago, when I was thinking about Mrs. Steig, I tried to think of who else had been important to me. I surprised myself by realizing it was Bill Hall. There were other teachers I liked and enjoyed being around, but this was different. I would never have thought of him as exciting, as I did Mrs. Steig. Most of us never tried to get away with anything or put something past him. We knew that wouldn’t fly. He was strict, but not unfair. He carried an authority I respected rather than feared. I just realized I could be describing my dad, Milt Hicks. I learned by their example how to behave in life, to do the work and stay on the right side of things. My dad died in 1975 a month before his 58th birthday.

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I may have dropped by the school after I graduated to see Mr. Hall when I was back on college breaks or in the summer, but don’t remember doing so. The next time I saw him so was in 2013. That year the class behind mine held a reunion and invited our class as well. I was thrilled to learn that Bill Hall would be there. It was great to be with him after all this time. As I write this, he’s still alive at age 98, so it’s unlikely, but not impossible, that I’ll ever see him again.

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I think that about does it. I’ll close by thanking all the teachers in my life, in school and out, then and now. Hopefully, I’m still learning. Thinking back to something Gary wrote me about Mrs. Steig that applies to Bill Hall as well, which was that she pushed Gary to reach higher and try harder. I like that.  — Ted Hicks, Class of ’62

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