I don't have as many pictures of Steven from his adult life. We kept in pretty close contact, but we lived in different places and evidently did not get together at a lot of photo opportunities. I got several of these from Steven's wife, Helle, after he died because the Abbot Pennings High School Class of 1985 made a donation to the Pennings Activity Center (which is the old Pennings school building, now an activity center at St. Norbert College) in Steven's name, and we wanted to put a picture of him in there.
Steven loved to Travel, and arranged several trips to very cool spots with his sister Lisa. She lives in France, and in 1997 Steven went to visit Lisa and her husband over Christmas. While there, they took a trip to Morocco. This is Steven and Lisa with a couple kids they met in Morocco.
I'm not sure I saw this picture before Helle gave it to me, but it's great. It looks like he's standing in front of a giant sand castle.
They must have celebrated Lisa's birthday on this trip.
I'm not sure where he is meditating, but I think it's still from Morocco.
Steven and Lisa also took a trip to China in 2000. Here he is on a train, somewhere in China. Lisa might be able to help me narrow that down, because I understand China is a big place.
Steven and I were both very interested in photography from an early age, and both kept it as a lifelong hobby. Here he is framing a shot in Michigan's UP. There are a multitude of things that sadden me about losing Steven so early. One of them is that I got a negative scanner and started to digitize my old negatives and slides, but that was not until after Steven was gone. I think he would have enjoyed this project of mine and we would of had a lot of fun with it, just as we did in our basement darkroom at his house in high school.
Steven owned and ran an independent consulting and freelance writing business since 2000. Steven, Lisa and some other colleagues merged their independent work into a new business called OneEarthSPC in 2003. This picture of Steven on Milwaukee's Riverwalk was from a photo shoot for their website.
After Steven got sick, he and Helle moved back to Milwaukee from Denmark, where they had been living in 2003. Between bouts of chemo, Steven packed a lot of experiences into his last year. Sometime in the summer of 2004, he and Tad went biking in Wisconsin.
Spring 2005 - When Steven & Helle came back to Wisconsin, he drove the Eagle Vision they had put into storage before they left. He was pleased when it turned over 100,000 miles and pulled over to take a picture of it. I can tell a lot from this picture. He pulled over and stopped to take this picture, but didn't shut off the car (tach at 900.)
Steven loved to fly, and getting his private pilot's license was one of his life goals. He received it in 2000, but really didn't have time to use it that often. When they came back to Milwaukee, they met Jim and Ann (my neighbors by coincidence.) Jim had a plane and they went flying in March of 2005.
We got together for a guys night out with college friends in March of 2005. Nobody was really acknowledging that it was our last time to get together with him, but I think Steven and I knew it was.
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This page was last updated 8/14/2008.
Note about this domain: A year or so after Steven died, I was transferring my domains and web hosting to a new provider and saw that Steven's domain, stevenlaplant.com, had expired. I grabbed it without really knowing why. Eventually I decided to put up this little memorial, but if any of his family would like it for something else, feel free to let me know. It can also be found at www.elfners.com/essays/steven .