Steve Griffith

1977

My dear friend Steve Griffith died on February 12 in a climbing accident on Chimborazo, a 20,500-foot mountain in Ecuador. He was 80 years old.

The story briefly made the news in Portland, as Steve was a public figure in town. He had been on the school board, even chaired it for a while. He ran for the state legislature once. Meanwhile, he had a full career as a litigation partner in the state's largest law firm. And he spent decades as a volunteer at Lincoln High School, where he taught about law and the Constitution, right up until he left us. By the time of his death, he was teaching full-time, for free. Thousands of people around the city knew him, or at least something about him.

Some readers of the sad news asked an obvious question: What was an 80-year-old guy doing climbing a mountain? But the more you knew about Griffith, the less surprised you were at this activity. For all the things he did in human society, he always took time to be on a trail somewhere, or in a sleeping bag, with or without a tent, or roped up on the side of a rock. Steve's love for the outdoors was legendary. He had a map of the world with markers on the peaks he'd summited, and those that he still wanted to conquer. The date on his birth certficate was not going to stop him.

If you rode with him to the airport as he was leaving for that Ecuador trip, he probably would have pointed out that the top of Chimborazo is the furthest from the earth's center that a person could stand. Or maybe he'd explain something even more interesting about the place. He had an enormous curiosity, about seemingly everything and everyone, and he loved history and geography.

There have been tributes, and there will be more. Steve’s journeys took him to many places, and into the lives of many people, more so than anyone else I've known. I’d guess that only he could catalog all of his adventures, although his wife Chris probably knows the most. You could write a book about the guy, maybe more than one. I’ll chip in here with part of a chapter.

* * * * * * * * * *

When I first met Griffith, I was suspicious. He was so smart, kind, and thoughtful that it didn’t seem real. Sooner or later, there would some chink in the armor, and the warts would show. We all have those moments where we look out for ourselves at the expense of others. This guy couldn’t be any different; he just had a thick veneer of virtuousness.

After a while, I was forced to abandon this theory.

Then I developed a new hypothesis: that sweet, selfless, brilliant Steve would eventually be beaten down by the world. He was too innocent and childlike, too honest. Sooner or later the rougher passages of life would take the edge off his good nature. 

If that happened, I never saw it. And we were friends for 50 years.

Could somebody spend every minute putting other people first? To be ever optimistic in the face of letdowns? To pursue noble goals as a full-time occupation? And enjoy it? I didn’t think such people actually existed. But then I got to know one pretty well.

* * * * * * * *

I first met Steve when we were students at Stanford Law School. He was in his second year there, I in my first. He was a little older than almost everybody else. He had been in the Peace Corps after graduating from Harvard. Bright and highly motivated, as nearly all of us were, Steve came across as also wise, and kind to an extreme. Somewhere in his law student time, his sister became ill and needed a kidney. When no other suitable donor could be found, of course Steve volunteered.

When he graduated, and went off to Portland to clerk for a federal judge (I think it was James Burns; whoever it was made a spectacular hire), I figured that that might be the last I would see of Steve. But the stars aligned otherwise. A few months after he was gone, I landed a law clerk position with a federal appeals judge, Ted Goodwin, also in Portland, for the following year. As I should have expected, soon my phone rang, and it was Steve. He was planning to stay in Portland, and he was renting a large house on the west side with empty rooms. I was welcome to stay there. And so I did.

Nearly a year after we made that deal over the phone, and having been to Portland only once before, I cruised into town on August 15, 1978. Everything I owned was with me in my Volkswagen Beetle. Following Steve’s directions, I got off I-5 at the exit that said “Beaverton,” which he assured me was a real name, and I headed west to the Rock Creek Country Club neighborhood, where the rental house was located.

It was a new-ish ranch house, owned by the parents of a schoolmate of ours who was also in Portland now. The parents lived in California somewhere, and they had bought the house on spec. When the value hit $100,000, they were going to sell it. At the time I showed up it was worth around $90,000, I think. In the meantime, it was for Steve and me to occupy at dirt-cheap rent.

But pretty soon it would be only me. Steve was wrapping up his clerkship and was about to embark on an around-the-world trip before starting work at a big-bucks (by Portland standards) law firm. He hit the road a short time after I arrived, and I had the place all to myself. Every once in a while a postcard would arrive, from New Zealand. Australia, I forget where all. He went in a westerly direction and circled the globe. The highlight of the trip, I recall, was a train ride across the entire expanse of Siberia. During that time, I was caretaker of the Griffith space.

There wasn’t much for belongings. Steve had furnished a bedroom and set up a simple office in another bedroom, but the rest of the place was empty. The kitchen table was a card table; the chairs were folding chairs. A black-and-white TV sat in the kitchen on top of a large, sturdy cardboard box. The screen was smaller than that of the laptop on which I’m writing this. Good enough to watch the Blazers, though.

My stuff didn’t do much to fill up the place. Never having lived in single-family house before, I decided to set up a mattress on the floor of the family room, so that I could have a fireplace at the foot of the bed. I liked the idea of that; Steve just laughed. I remember having my clothes laid out on a bench from the picnic table.

As Spartan as the décor was, there were a couple of objects in the living room that were important. One was a piano. After dinner, Steve could crack his knuckles and crank out Brahms or something, from memory. And on the floor on the other side of the room sat an old portable Garrard turntable and an album collection. There weren’t many records in there, but they were carefully curated. I remember one fall day, me flipping through the small pile and finding Al Green’s Greatest Hits. Then there was Bill Withers’s Greatest Hits, just as good. Those two got a lot of play.

* * * * * * * * * *

By the time Griffith got back, showing off his fantastic photos from faraway places like Ayers Rock, I too had decided to stay in Portland indefinitely. At this news, he began to teach me about the great outdoors, something about which I knew less than nothing. I remember that Step One was a trip to invest in a pair of legitimate hiking boots at the Danner outlet store in Milwaukie. I still have those boots, and they’ve got more years to go on them, although they don’t fit quite as well as they did originally. Around Year 37, my feet changed just a bit.

A later phase of my outdoor education was an expedition up Mount McLaughlin, a mountain in the Cascades just outside of Ashland. Steve wanted to show me what it was like to stand on top of a tall peak and look all around. So there I was, this guy from New Jersey, trudging up the side of a mountain on what was supposed to be a day trip up to the summit and back. There were crampons on our feet. Or maybe they were snowshoes, I didn’t know the difference. But it was too early in the year for a one-day expedition; the snow was too deep. We had to turn around and head back to Ashland in time for the curtain on a play. I did make it to the top of Mount McLaughlin that summer, or maybe it was the next summer, with my big brother Steve as an inspiration, though not as a guide on that particular day. It wasn’t K-2, but it was plenty tall enough for me: 9,493 feet.

This was also a time of much running. Steve and I logged a fair number of miles together on the roads. The guy could move, and was rumored to hold his own on the tennis court as well.

We were an odd couple. He was a teetotaling, upright Protestant, son of a Foreign Service officer, graduate of Sidwell Friends School in D.C., Harvard, Oxford too as I recall, careful and thoughtful. I was a hard-charging, hard-drinking, womanizing Catholic boy from Jersey, a Saint Peter's Peacock, slightly out of control and without a clue as to where I was going. But we had important things in common, and they took precedence. Go figure.

It was during our time in the ranch house that I learned more about what Steve had been doing before he tackled law school. On Sundays, when long-distance charges were at their lowest, the phone would ring, and it was somebody in Africa, often a young man, someone whom Steve had taught when he was in the Peace Corps. As I recall, there were several different Liberians who would call. Their country was deeply troubled. They were calling with news, asking for advice. They came to the right place. Steve would stop whatever else he was doing and close the office door to take the call. The conversation would always go on for quite a while.

One day the phone rang and the landlord was on the line. The house was being sold. The price had hit $105,000. And so I was a witness to Steve’s transition into home ownership. He bought an old converted farmhouse in the First Addition neighborhood in Lake Oswego, and I was lucky enough to be invited to room upstairs. I remember Steve being amused at the scene in Lake O. An avid student of Oregon history, he reminded me frequently that the lake there had originally been called Sucker Lake. The implication was that perhaps they shouldn’t have changed the name.

I remember two visits to Portland by Steve’s dad, Ernest Griffith. He was a smart, gentle old guy with a hearty laugh, a gleam in his eye, and a genuine interest in the people he met here. In the afternoon he would eat dark chocolate. Doctor’s orders, he would say, to keep his blood sugar up.

After a short spell in Steve’s new place, I acquired a serious girlfriend and moved out. Meanwhile, Steve had met a very nice woman at work, and they had become an item, too. So arrived the end of the odd couple days.

* * * * * * * * * *

Griffith and I worked at the same law firm for six years or so before I went off into teaching. He was downstairs in the litigation department. How he managed to succeed so well in that job, I never quite understood. He was smart enough, all right, but aren’t litigators supposed to be a cutthroat bunch, drained of all human compassion and mercy? Here was a man who lived every day as graciously as he could. I never got close enough to his bailiwick to see how he operated.

But I did hear from the people he worked with, and their stories were pure Steve. He bailed them out when they were in trouble. He said something wise that they would always remember. He quietly carried dry ice on a backpacking trip so that everybody could have ice cream under the stars.

In those days many, if not most, of the lawyers in the firm wore suits from the Downtown Nordstrom store. We’d all be in the elevator together sporting the same clothes. The salesman over there was a guy named Jean Claude, or at least that was the moniker he went by. Selling on commission, he made more money than the associate lawyers did. But Steve had a different approach to menswear. He kept a suit jacket in the office (or maybe it was an entire suit) for when he needed to appear in court, but he commuted in this brightly colored down-filled vest over a dress shirt and tie. The vest was orange, I think, or even red. Jean Claude would not approve.

Then there were the cars. When I lived with Steve out in Rock Creek, it was a green Fiat four-speed, very plebeian and not at all sporty. He was big on getting to his destination with as little fuss as possible, and didn’t care much about looks. Later he had a white Volkswagen Rabbit convertible that he drove for 40 years or more. I gave up on my Rabbit after a very short time – it was the worst car I ever owned – but Steve got decades out of that thing, even as the rag top was disintegrating before our very eyes. 

* * * * * * * * * *

In the mid-'80s, Griffith got into politics. He ran for the school board and won by something like 10 votes. During the campaign, he had us all knocking on doors, asking if we could put his signs up on people’s lawns. I was assigned Northeast Ainsworth Street, where I made a measly three or four placements. Meanwhile, our law school classmate sweet-talked dozens of people into it, further out in northeast. One day I was driving out to the airport and couldn’t get over how many Griffith signs there were out that way. When you win by as slight a margin as Steve did, every sign counted. So did the benches at the bus stops. He had a shrewd campaign manager, and she knew all about those.

Steve served on the school board for two terms, I think, and for one of them I know he was the chair of the board. I may be getting this wrong, but I think that that was the board that brought Matthew Prophet to town to be superintendent. He did a good job.

There was another foray into politics, this one less successful. In 2010, Steve ran in the Republican primary for the state House of Representatives from his district in southwest Portland. Things weren’t as polarized then as they are now, but even then enough seeds of division had been sown that there wasn’t room for a decent, wise, moderate guy.

2010

At that point, Griffith retired, took up golf, bought a yacht, and spent a lot of time hunting wild game. Only kidding! For him, retirement took the form of becoming a full-time volunteer high school teacher, specializing in advanced civics. He was deeply engaged with the public school system right up until the time he left us.

Another facet of the story of Steve and education goes back to those long, long-distance Sunday phone calls at the Rock Creek house. Remarkably, stunningly, Steve and his wife Chris founded a preschool in Gbarnga, Liberia, where Steve had served in the Peace Corps. The couple dreamed it up, set it up, and got it built and operating, all from scratch. It's called the Garden School, and you can read about it here.

I didn't learn about the school until after Steve had died and the tributes were pouring in. By the last time I had shared lunch with him, one-on-one, just before Covid, the school was already operational, but I don't recall him even mentioning it. He was not one to blow his own horn too loudly. It makes you wonder how many other kindnesses and gifts he bestowed over a lifetime. Probably a new one every day. Then he'd drive off in that dilapidated Rabbit.

For Steve's 80th birthday last December, Chris and the kids threw a bash at the house in his honor. Many people were there, from many different walks of life. I had to leave early to go make an airport pickup, but after I had run that errand, I went back for the end of the party, when the last of the guests were trickling out. We would meet up for lunch again soon, Steve and I agreed. I got an extra handshake, an extra embrace.

* * * * * * * * * *

His middle name was Loyal. I never did get the full story behind that, but on anybody else it might have been kind of hokey. What, like a Boy Scout? On Steve, it made perfect sense, but it was too weak to capture the guy's virtues. He was loyal to a fault, yes, but that was just a small part of his makeup.

Eighty years is a nice run, but a world without Steve Griffith does not seem complete. Fortunately he left traces of his spirit in countless, far-flung places, and his influence will be felt for a long time. He's that light over there, cutting through the dark. See you around, my friend.