Genius is a word that has been used many times over the last few days in describing Dick Steffy, and rightly so, Yet there are two other words, both mentioned several times during his memorial service, that must be taken into consideration if we are to comprehend fully the nature of his genius: respect and integrity. During the mid 1960s, I devoted over 3 years to making a reconstruction on paper of a 7th century Yassi Ada Byzantine ship whose very fragmentary remains had been uncovered by our excavation at Yassi Ada. When I finally finished, my mother-in-law remarked that my reconstruction looked more like a canoe than a ship, and Peter Throckmorton gently assured me that my ship would not have made it out of port on her maiden voyage. These were the kindest comments made. Even so, Dick treated my work with the utmost respect when he then tested its validity through a series of models made over more than a decade (on one of these models a plank sprang with a loud explosive sound in the middle of the night, as Laina Swiny described during the memorial service). During all that time, he never departed from my basic empirical data until finally convinced he had no other choice but to alter slightly the shape of just one of the surviving frame fragments. I then went back to the original field drawing of the offending frame and discovered that I had made an error when transcribing it to a reconstruction drawing. My reconstruction of the ship also benefited greatly from the integrity he typically brought to his research. I remember vividly how, during the 4 months we worked together at the same drafting table in Kyrenia in 1974, he systematically went through the complete sequence of installing the hull planking asking why the shipwright had dimensioned and tapered each successive strake the way he did. Only when these questions had been fully answered to his satisfaction was he ready to undertake his final model, which would of course be a final test of his conclusions.
It was this experience that first led me to conclude that his respect for the work of others and the integrity in his own work were the foundation blocks on which Dick’s genius rested, and continued to rest throughout his life.
Fred van Doorninck