High school days

I attended junior high and McLean High School with Steve.  Here are some scattered memories:

It never looked like Steve devoted much time to homework and he never seemed to break a sweat in class, but he always seemed to know everything.  Civil war history was very big in our Virginia education in the 1960s.  Steve knew every battle, every battlefield, and every general.  He probably knew the firearms as well, but I probably glazed over at that point.

Steve was the McLean High School yearbook editor.  The faculty advisor was Mr. Marranian.  To me Mr. Marranian was a teacher and that elicited no questions from me about his personal history or his origins.  Steve called him Marranian the Armenian and joked with him about the massacres and forced marches that occurred after WWI. We were juniors in high school!  I still had to look it up now in Wikipedia to get that “massacres and forced marches” phrase.  It was much more of a peer-to-peer relationship than I remember the rest of us having with our teachers.  Steve seemed older in some ways, I think because his intelligence and humor gave him at least an appearance of calm.

Steve loved fresh cherries.  We cut school one day when we were seniors and figured we had it in the bag.  We walked to a shopping area nearby and Steve bought a big bag of cherries.  We ate them, spitting out the seeds, as we walked back to school, feeling like for the moment, we had arrived.

One day Steve and our friend Johanna Putnoi were over at my house and we decided to take my sister-in-law sledding.  Here is what she remembers about that day:  I remember Steve quite well.  My favorite memory of him was one day while I was visiting in McLean.  It was winter.  There was a lot of snow.  You and Steve and Joanna (I think) decided that they would take me sledding. First challenge was finding enough warm clothes for me.  After all, I had spent most of my life in the deep south and was living on Oahu.  Steve kept noticing that I was wearing your clothes and commented that I didn't have warm clothes. I remember thinking that was very observant for a high school male.  Then came the actual sledding.  And Steve put me in front and explained the steering mechanism.  I thought I understood but at the crucial moment, we all became painfully aware that I did not know right from left.  The sled was totaled.  There were no human injuries except for my wounded ego. I am so sorry to hear about Steve. Obviously, I have a fond memory of  both him and Johanna.

My mother disappeared bit by bit to dementia over seven years before she died recently.  Sometimes we would wander in conversation back to the years in McLean.  This always included the names Johanna Putnoi and Steve Dantzker.  The ripples from a life spread wide.  

Condolences to Steve’s family and friends.  Bruce, I remember you from McLean too and I’m sorry that you have lost your kind and funny brother.   Suzy Hill