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- Aug 25
- 7 min read

A Humble Legend in our Midst – Dr. Arthur Steffee

A Humble Legend in our Midst – Arthur Steffee

By Katherine Soroka

Dr. Arthur D. Steffee,

photo from Aug. 7, 2024.

With respect, admiration and gratitude, Allegheny RiverStone Center for the Arts mourns the passing of its beloved founder and president, Dr. Arthur D. Steffee, Jr. on his 90th birthday on Friday, August 16, in an outdoor accident at his StoneRidge residence that may have been related to recent heart issues. Link to the obituary. On Sunday, August 18, instead of the Lincoln Hall birthday celebration planned in his honor, the sensitive virtuosity of Van Cliburn and Tchaikovsky piano competition medalist Kenny Broberg was a solace to grieving friends and audience members in works by Chopin, Medtner, Mozart, Poulenc, and Franck-Bauer.

Opening the concert, Executive Director John Soroka expressed ARCA’s appreciation for its visionary founder. Arthur’s profound love of music was his impetus to bring together a community of people to experience glorious music and art in the village he built in the Allegheny-Clarion River valley. “Wasn’t that beautiful?” Arthur would say with tears in his eyes after a magnificent performance in Lincoln Hall. “You couldn’t hear anything better in any concert hall in the world – and we’re here, in this most beautiful place.”

He was a humble giant in our midst. A true visionary, genius inventor and Father of Modern Spinal Medicine, Arthur was a guru to surgeons around the world, compassionate and life-changing physician affecting hundreds of thousands of patients with his inventions, servant leader, generous humanitarian, lover of classical music, botanist, animal lover, architectural landscape designer, pond/bog/waterfall builder, big-machine operator, beloved human being, and friend to all he met. Whether he was talking about tractors or Rachmaninoff, people felt they were his friend from the moment they met him. Sunday’s concert program included an insert with the poem “Life’s Greatest Gifts” by Dr. Ralph Bingham Cloward, an American neurosurgeon best known for his innovations in spinal neurosurgery. Arthur read the poem at special gatherings and had it printed to give to friends. When reading the last few lines, his voice would break, with tears in his eyes.

Life’s Greatest Gifts

When you get on and you’ve lived a lot and the blood in your veins isn’t quite so hot and your eyes are dimmer then they were, and the page on the book has a misty blur, strange as the case may seem to be, then is the time you’ll clearly see.

You’ll see yourself as you truly are| when you’ve lived a lot and you’ve traveled far:

when your strength gives out and your muscles tire you’ll see the folly of mad desires;

you’ll see what then to your eyes had hid - the countless trivial things you did.

For often the blindest are the youthful eyes; age must come e’re man grows wise.

Youth makes much of the mountain peaks. the strife for fame and the goal he seeks.

but age sits down with the setting sun. And enjoys the useful deed he’s done.

You’ll sigh for the friends, who were cast aside, with a hasty word or a show of pride,

and you’ll laugh at the medals which you prize because you will see them through different eyes

You’ll understand how little they really meant, For which so much of your strength was spent.

You’ll see as always an old man sees, that waves die down with the fading breeze and the pomps of life never last for long, the great sink back to the common throng, but you’ll understand when the struggle ends that the finest gifts in life are friends!

Ralph B. Cloward

Also in the concert program insert was the text to the Finale of Mahler’s Second Symphony, “The Resurrection”. For the past two months since the delivery to his StoneRidge barn of top-of-line Wilson audio speakers, Arthur had been listening to the transcendent Mahler Finale nearly every day. He would turn up the volume and with tears in his eyes quote the words Mahler wrote as its conclusion. “I shall die, so as to live… What you have conquered  will bear you to God.”

Surely as he entered those pearly gates the closing measures of the Mahler Finale were playing with cosmic reinforcement. Here is the 2004 performance of the Finale of Mahler’s Second Symphony – “The Resurrection” – performed by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra for the Pope in the Vatican: “A Celebration of Faiths: The Papal Concert of Reconciliation” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlZUiekxM8Q

A Way of Life

Since Arthur’s passing, his wife Marybeth Hinds Steffee has received an outpouring of condolences and affection from friends from all walks of life and across the globe who were touched by his compassion, kindness and generosity beyond any ever known. Arthur was loved by many – because he loved them – and they felt it in his presence. He loved humanity in his dedication to serve and make a difference. Whether he was talking about heavy equipment, trees or music that inspired him – or whether he had spoken to you on a few occasions or treasured your friendship for years – Arthur impacted lives. As a servant leader, Arthur already had done-it-all, and was not seeking power for himself. He was dedicated to living each day to its fullest and doing something kind for those around him to empower them – as he would say, “to make a difference with his life.” His life philosophy was molded on the principles of Sir Dr. William Osler, the knighted Canadian physician known as the “Father of Modern Medicine” who was a graduate of McGill University (Arthur Steffee’s alma mater) and one of the four founding physicians of John Hopkins Hospital. Arthur carried with him the little book he had received when he graduated from McGill Medical School, which was among the few remnants of the house fire in 1961 that took the lives of his wife and three young children. It contained the text of the address that Osler had delivered to the Yale student body on April 21, 1913 – A Way of Life – in which each day he recommended to live for the day only… in strict 24-hour increments, “letting neither yesterday nor tomorrow be a worry today” – to find “peace in the moment.” “The way of life that I preach is a habit to be acquired gradually by long and steady repetition: It is the practice of living for the day only, and for the day’s work; Life in day-tight compartments. Undress your soul at night; not by self-examination, but by shedding, as you do your garments, the daily sins, whether of omission or of commission, and you will wake a free man, with a new life. The quiet life in day-tight compartments will help you to bear your own and others’ burdens with a light heart.”

Living this philosophy would be a blessing to Arthur to overcome tragedy and loss in his life. Arthur shared with friends about living each day to the fullest in what Osler referred to as “day-tight-compartments.” Every evening at sunset, he and his wife Marybeth would ride to the top of StoneRidge to Sunset Point with its view to the west and landscaped solar calendar – and say a prayer to thank God for their day and to ask for “just one more.”

To his physician friends and colleagues, Arthur gave Osler’s “A Way of Life” and personally inscribed the book – just as he gave framed copies of Cloward’s “Life’s Greatest Gifts.”

Dr. Arthur Steffee and wife

Marybeth Hinds Steffee

Legendary Generosity

To many, Arthur’s generosity was beyond anything they had ever known. He gave with no expectation of return, but always was touched by a “thank you”. The stories of Arthur’s generosity are legendary. And he was constantly giving. His thoughtful gifts were ideally suited to the person’s dream, need or unperceived opportunity. They ranged from buying someone a house to giving a pick up and ATV, hot tub, antique lamp, painting or hen of the woods mushrooms he had just picked – to giving a wall of rocks or showing up with big equipment to build someone a waterfall – to giving gift-wrapped whole smoked salmons at Christmas (to 30 of his close friends) – to delivering cinnamon ferns from his forest, planting a row of boxwoods, or sharing a special plant or Franklinia tree that he also had just purchased for himself. The epitome of philanthropy – from the heart – were his gifts to ARCA including paying for Lincoln Hall’s restoration and buying its seven-foot Steinway piano and Wurlitzer theatre organ. And this just scratches the surface. Similarly, his hospitality had no equal – both in the mansion at RiverStone Farm with his late wife Patricia and in recent years in the “barn”/guest house in Arthur and Marybeth’s StoneRidge estate overlooking the river valley. There they welcomed community friends, medical colleagues from around the world, Oil City High School classmates and ARCA members for donor receptions and encore performances by pianists after Lincoln Hall concerts. Over the years, Amish friends from Ohio – on whose parent’s spine Arthur had operated in exchange for ‘a load of hay’ – would come and stay for a week to help with farm projects or hunt. Arthur’s kindnesses were given without measure or expectation – in an unconditional way – which is among the reasons many experienced him as a surrogate brother, father or grandfather.

End of Part 1 – to be continued in the September 2 issue.

Katherine Soroka is grateful for her many years of friendship with Arthur Steffee as a board member and artistic director of Allegheny RiverStone Center for the Arts.