Jodie Steck, a beloved college classmate, and pioneering world-class photo editor and project manager succumbed to ovarian cancer last week. She was 73 years old.
She made her mark tangling within the heavily dominated old boys’ network of mainstream print media organizing and editing the daily stream of photographs that appeared in many of our national newspapers. For a while, she even edited the daily photos from the White House.
But I get a little ahead of myself.
My wife Sharon and I often visit most everything we can on the weekends — we subscribe to the coloring book of life where we want to fill in as many pages that we can by exploring both our neighborhoods, and the whole world. At one point when we lived in the San Francisco area we visited the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center during an open house event. (They have changed the name of the place since we visited.)
We caught a bus ride from the Stanford Shopping Center to just west of Stanford University’s main campus where our group was taken to a classroom for a quick 30-minute physics lesson before we could actually visit the laboratory where all the scientific research occurred.
During that lesson we were told their equipment pushes electrons and positrons to high energies using a two-mile long linear accelerator. This is achieved by passing the particles through a series of accelerating structures where they gain energy from electromagnetic fields, specifically microwave power traveling through a waveguide. The accelerated particles are then used for various research purposes, including colliding them to study fundamental particles.
Arizona State University
It occurred to me later that my college days and nights acted very much like a giant linear accelerator too.
Back in those days the textbooks, the conversations, the lectures, the reporting, the writing/rewriting, the photography, our madcap adventures, and the competitions all pushed us forward at great speed. We were all going faster and faster each and every day while bouncing into everything and being judged on our results.
For me, when I arrived at the School of Journalism at Arizona State University in the late 1970s, there were daily high-speed collisions among neophyte students, inspiring instructors, strong personalities, and a wonderful collection of various histories of everyone often found at state universities.
We were all learning how to identify and share our stories and how to adjust to the guillotine nature of deadlines. It all started abruptly during the first class on the first day when an instructor ripped a page out of my typewriter shouting, “Deadline!”
If our college experience could be characterized as a different type of linear accelerator colliding lighter elements together for fascinating results then Jodie Steck was a much heavier element. She was Cobalt!
Cobalt is a chemical element, denoted by the symbol Co and atomic number 27. It’s a hard, lustrous, silvery-gray metal, often used in alloys and batteries. Cobalt also has a historical and artistic significance, particularly in the creation of cobalt blue pigments. Jodie was both energy and artistic flair.
Jodie was a tad older than the rest of us in college. Not much, just a couple of years but she had more poise, more momentum, more mass when she wanted to make a point. She used her humorous nature, a quick wit, and a precise memory to remember details including names of almost everyone she met which added to her impact.
Jodie was also in a bigger hurry than most of us. She had already been married, divorced, and worked as a cable technician/installer before arriving at college so she had the approach to be efficient, precise, and very competent. No do-overs.
She Had Game
Many of us at Arizona State enjoyed sports, and Jodie was no different. We played tennis endlessly, played basketball, and occasionally golfed.
We were lucky to have cozy relationships with professors who called us on the weekends to join another afternoon of hoops even though we may have missed a lecture that week.
Although Jodie had some occasional knee issues, she played hard all the time. She played to win. When she and I played two on two basketball against other dudes she set picks, understood the choreography of passing lanes, pick and rolls, reverse layups, and crossover dribbles. We both could shoot, and we were both not afraid to take the big shots. As she would repeat throughout her career, she shared the ball!
I think her early understanding of sports body movements enhanced her photo editing skills to identify the best angles and the best moments to take the most revealing photos.
Jodie edited photos of starlets and celebrities as they pirouetted on red carpets in Hollywood, sports heroes during their biggest games, devastating news events, and Presidents with other world-class politicians at the White House.
After School
After graduating we all bounced away in different directions although a healthy group of us bounced over to Los Angeles, CA. Jodie was there too working at Associated Press during big events and inviting everyone to the best dance clubs and parties on the weekends.
She had us join her new friends that she had met in the film industry, and the parties could run throughout the night.
My wife Sharon was my girlfriend back then and Sharon would often take a nap in a corner of a loud party. Sharon would awaken when the early morning light arrived. Before we could refuse, Jodie would cook a quick breakfast by taking a slice of bread, cutting out a hole in the middle, cracking a fresh egg into the hole and fried it all up. Jodie called it a Toad in the Hole.
When I announced Jodie’s death to Sharon, she quickly asked, “Who is going to make me Toad in the Hole now? Jodie was the only one who made me Toad in the Hole!”
A little later down the road, Sharon and I lived in San Francisco, CA, and one weekend we even helped Jodie move near Santa Rosa, CA, while she worked for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat newspaper. Although we repeatedly invited her to join our other weekend adventures she never attended.
Naturally, she was invited to our festive wedding and party out on deck at a lodge in Sonoma County. This time, Jodie said she would be there.
In the whirlwind on that wedding day afternoon someone announced it was time to start the ceremony. “We can’t start now.” I said. “Jodie isn’t here yet!” Someone else simply said, “It’s time to start Ed!” So, we started without her. Jodie had moved on. After that afternoon, our trajectories would push us further and further apart. We may not have hugged each other again since then as she never fully explained her absence at our wedding and I probably didn’t offer her enough opportunities to explain.
Other classmates and social media dutifully reported our respective careers, awards, major successes, and world adventures for each other.
Changing World
Jodie honored the decisive moment when there were those official decisive moments in the world of print journalism.
A daily newspaper, a weekly news magazine, a monthly periodical, they all had hard deadlines that needed the very best image to capture an event. Jodie honored those decisive moments and those hard deadlines.
However, the Internet arrived, and it just eviscerated print journalism.
The Internet took away so much, the revenue source by stealing almost all the advertising ads, consumers habits, and consumer trust on what really happened.
There are no decisive moments any longer because the Internet is in business 24 hours a day. Those delicious decisive moments that were just officially published were over 10 minutes ago. There are new moments arriving all the time. How could those earlier decisive moments be any more important than all these new decisive moments?
There is way more competition for everyone’s attention now, and there are more and more artificial moments published endlessly. Crowdsourcing now decides the most important moments. The bigger the crowd, the more important the moment.
Farewell My Friend
I had read that when Dorothea Lange, the influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, died in 1965 she was cremated. Her friends and family took her ashes to a cove north of the Golden Gate Bridge and released her ashes in the surf, but her ashes wouldn’t sink. They just floated away. I think if we organized a ceremony like that for Jodie Steck her ashes wouldn’t sink either! Jodie was much more effervescent than most of us.
We just celebrated the 4th of July holiday with all those spectacular fireworks but now all those fireworks are all gone. A few years ago, Sharon and I had joined some friends in Santa Monica, CA to attend their July 4th Fireworks Show at dawn. Apparently, there were too many drunken rumbles waiting for the fireworks show at night, so they rescheduled them just before sunrise.
Our friends had us hop on the back of their motorcycles so we could weave through and around the traffic to get a great vantage point for the fireworks, and it was truly a magnificent experience! Afterwards, we just joined the crowd all around us as everyone went out for breakfast.
We should be able to order a personal fireworks show whenever someone extraordinary dies so we could get up early for our missing friend, watch the morning fireworks, then go out to breakfast together. Jodie would certainly love that if we could do it for her!
There must be somebody we can call to make that happen!
Jodie, we had great laughs, early victories, and some wonderful decisive moments together!
Goodbye my dear, we miss you already.
Cache of Communiqués 