William Varian Mitchell Steele

I'm sorry to tell everyone here that Bill Steele, writer of many great
songs including "Chocolate Chip Cookies", "Griselda's Waltz", and, most
famously, "Garbage!", died on Monday of smoke inhalation when a fire at
his house in Ithaca, NY, started in his kitchen. He was 86, and until
April 1 was still working full-time at the Cornell University News
Service. The fire was contained quickly, and no one else was hurt.

Bill was descended from people who came over on the Mayflower, and
Mitchell Street in Ithaca was named after his mother's family. He grew
up in Williamsville, NY, just outside of Buffalo, and talked often about
his Saturday afternoons going to movies. He loved the old science
fiction serials, and when I last spoke to him a couple of weeks ago, he
told me he was enjoying watching some of the sillier sf movies on TV. He
was always interested in science, and began his degree at Cornell as a
physics major, shifting to psychology halfway through.

What he liked best, though, was making people laugh. As a Cornell
student, he worked on the now-defunct college humor magazine, The
Cornell Widow.

I didn't meet Bill until he was 40, in 1972, when he came back to live
in Ithaca after a stint in San Francisco, where he worked for a local
newspaper and then in a guitar store, taught guitar lessons, and wrote
his first songs. His mother had died, and he'd come back to Ithaca for
what was meant to be a short time to fix up her house. Instead, he wound
up staying in Ithaca, active on the folk scene, for the rest of his
life. We met at a Cornell Folk Song Club party at the home of George and
Jo Houghton. He drove me back to the student apartment I shared, and we
sat in his car and talked until dawn. He was funny, smart, and
knowledgeable. Later, he generously helped me get my start playing
professionally on the folk scene.

Throughout the time I knew him, Bill pursued both those interests:
science writing and folk music. He particularly liked explaining complex
science to the general public and, especially, kids. He wrote for
numerous publications including Scholastic magazines, the Cornell
Chronicle, Working Mother, and Family Circle before he went to work
full-time for the Cornell News Service at an age when most people are
starting to retire. He was an early adopter of computers in general (he
had an early Osborne word processor, if I remember correctly, and I
think wrote some manuals for it) and the web in particular. At a time
when few knew anything about the web, he designed and wrote the Cornell
News website, which ran on his software until a just a few years ago
when they migrated it to Drupal.

As a folksinger, he toured all over the country in the 1970s and 1980s,
combining topical humor with thoughtful observations of the world around
him. A longtime admirer of Pete Seeger, he particularly liked getting
everyone to sing, and also to write songs: "If you can sing, then you
can write a song," he says in "A Thousand Songs", an anthem to folk
festivals and their all-night singing parties.

He recorded two albums, "Garbage! and other Garbage" and "Chocolate Chip
Cookies". His 1970 song "The Walls Have Ears", inspired by Watergate,
was remarkably prescient about today's loss of privacy; "Garbage!",
which was recorded several times by Pete Seeger, was an early (1969)
contribution to the environmental movement; "Laughing Sally" mourned the
loss of a well-loved San Francisco amusement park to an apartment
complex; and "Charlie Chan" was ahead of its time in critiquing the
racism of casting white people to play a stereotyped Asian character. "A
Thousand Songs" is an anthem to folk festivals and their all-night
singing parties, while "Gasoline Gypsies" celebrated the nomadic
lifestyle of folksingers and others. A personal favorite is "A Song for
Just After Christmas", which retells the Christmas story in a modern
setting. Of his more recent songs, perhaps the best known is "Griselda's
Waltz", which I was captured playing on autoharp by someone who uploaded
it to YouTube, and has been recorded by Dana and Susan Robinson on their
album "Big Mystery". In 2009, the Cornell News Service wrote a profile.

Most of the songs mentioned here are available for free download from
Bill's website.

I'm sure many people here have their own memories of Bill, and I look
forward to reading them.

Graveside services will be held Saturday, January 05, 2019

at 1:30 pm at the East Lawn Cemetery. There are no calling hours.

R.I.P. William Varian Mitchell Steele, February 20, 1932 - December 17,
2018.