Steve Jennings had one wicked sense of humor. It wasn’t mean or derogatory. It was lightning quick, delightful for others and so valuable to him.
He needed it throughout his life, which ended July 25 at age 70 after a 50-plus year standoff with Friedreich’s ataxia, a progressive neurodegenerative disease Steve ironically referred to occasionally as “my old friend Freddy.”
I say standoff because during all those decades he refused – fiercely – to give in to Freddy. Diagnosed as a pre-teen, he fought like a wolverine to live a full, purposeful life.
Score that one Steve 1, Freddy 0.
We met in 1973, when Steve was in high school and I was sports editor of the Daily News-Democrat in Festus, my first job out of Mizzou’s School of Journalism. Steve was a freelance writer for the paper, so I became his editor.
At 17, he was still walking, with some difficulty, and driving a car, often adventurously. He covered his Crystal City High School teams and others in the old Jefferson County Conference, already demonstrating an eye for detail and a natural gift for storytelling despite his lack of experience or formal training.
He had the genes for gravitating toward sportswriting. His late dad, Ike, was a standout end for Mizzou in the early ’50s, then played a year for the Green Bay Packers. Steve’s sisters were track and volleyball stars, his younger brother an up-and-coming track phenom.
Those sports were his sweet spot. Not so much baseball – Steve once reported that a game he covered had been won by one point.
After high school, Steve headed to Mizzou for his freshman year, presumably bound for its J-School. But the time wasn’t right for him, and a new opportunity had presented itself.
It was the opening of a new newspaper on Main Street in Festus, the Courier-News, later renamed the Courier-Journal. I was its wet-behind-the-ears news editor, but at 26 a grizzled veteran compared with our 20-year-old sports editor, Steve Jennings.
The owner was Frank Bick, who owned nine other Journals, mostly in St. Louis city and county. He was the perfect owner as far as we were concerned – he never came near the place. Both single, we worked ridiculous hours to put out a weekly paper, with Steve pitching in on news while I helped him by covering games at night.
It was about that time when Steve started using a walker. It slowed him down not one bit.
One day our sales manager, Tom Marschel, an actual adult sent down from St. Louis to try to bring order to our kiddie kingdom, was listening to one of his salesmen whine about something. The guy went on and on.
Tom wandered back to the newsroom, shaking his head. Steve was out somewhere.
“You know something,” Tom said. “Steve has more guts in his little finger than that guy does in his entire body.”
That was a bull’s-eye.
Steve was a newspaperman through and through by then. One day at the Stoplight Drive-In, Steve gave his usual lunch order and his soda didn’t arrive. The waitress explained it would be a minute while they washed some glassware.
His pixie grin lit up as he responded with a headline:
“Glass shortage grips local eatery.”
Another time we were going to a ball game, and I went to pick him up. Our bachelor “dinner” was going to be crackers and a foot and a half of Oberle link sausage, widely known as Oberle dog, that I’d just bought at the butcher shop. It was on the front seat of my top-down convertible when I went inside to get Steve.
When we came out, there was a white flutter of butcher paper blowing across the yard away from a large, happy black dog.
Steve apprised the situation and flashed that double-pun-coming grin.
“I guess that IS the Oberle dog,” he said. “That son-of-a-bitch.”
Bingo, on all counts.
The years rolled on. Steve kept writing but the Journals had changed hands. The new owner was Ralph Ingersoll II, very East Coast. Suddenly, Mizzou sounded like a good idea again to Steve.
He was 34, by then getting around campus on an Amigo scooter, attending college as an underclassman at the same time his much younger cousins, Jill and Amy Jo Cook, were there.
“Once, at a local bar, a college kid Steve knew came up to us and told Steve he was so smart he could be president. We laughed because Steve was 34 and 35 is the minimum age to be president,” Amy said. “When his birthday arrived, we bought him a giant cookie that said ‘Happy 35th Birthday, Steve. You could be president now!’
“It became one of those stories that we told over and over. Steve had a brilliant mind and a sense of humor that was unmatched. To be part of his journey at Mizzou and in his life was truly an honor.”
While at Mizzou, Steve met Ana Leitzelar. They married in 1994 and became a formidable couple in the disability rights community. They lobbied, they protested when needed. They lived the reality of accessibility challenges and didn’t back down.
I’m sure Ana will continue the work, and dedicate it to Steve’s memory and life.
To those who knew him, it was nothing less than inspirational.
