Steven Craig Wilber

1951 - 2023

The men's fine apparel industry braces for a serious downturn as they mourn, along with the rest of us, the passing of Steven Craig Wilber of Springville, Pennsylvania, on Dec. 9, 2023. Closets in the house are nearly bursting at the seams. So tightly packed are the closets, drawers, boxes and shelves that even a skinny moth hasn't a snowball's chance in a bonfire of squeezing in. A substantial shoe rack groans under the weight of multitudinous pairs of handsome shoes. It is even rumored that the local Salvation Army has taken on extra employees with great hopes of an influx of fine clothing, just in time for Christmas.

As a youth, he called Circle Pines, Minnesota, home, where his parents, Donald and Philis (Holm) Wilber, raised a brood of five children. David, Steven, Lauri, Michael and Janet. And like all good Norwegians, his parents saw to it that the progeny attended the Lutheran Church, where Steve cultivated his beautiful singing voice. Congregations for many years enjoyed his dulcet tones, although eventually he moved on and referred to himself as a recovering Lutheran, never losing his spiritual nature or love of music.

When Steve graduated from Centennial High School, it was near the height of the Vietnam War, and he chose to enlist in the United States Navy, which found him sailing the Mediterranean Sea and the North Atlantic, serving as a radarman on the ship USS Richard L. Paige until his discharge in 1973.

Oddly enough, even after cruising the Mediterranean and seeing how other people live, where the weather isn't routinely trying to kill you with frigid temperatures, he returned to his roots in Minnesota, where he lived for many years and was blessed with three children, Jennifer Wilber Kvass, of Elk River, Minnesota; son, Kristopher Wilber, of Gladstone, Michigan, and his children, Aura, Gus and Freya; and son, Donald Wilber, of Plymouth, Minnesota. He will always be remembered as a kind and gentle father.

He spent the bulk of his working life as a quality manager in the injection molding industry, eventually finishing his career working for Apria Health Care until his retirement in 2017. He then happily moved to Pennsylvania to enjoy the comparatively balmy climate. His years of retirement were spent walking eight to ten miles every day, biking many trails in Pennsylvania and New York, soaring in a glider, enjoying bonfires with friends, visiting museums and historic landmarks, standing tirelessly at the ironing board pressing shirts and listening to jazz, skydiving, traveling to Main, Florida, Arizona, Colorado and many points in between, and dining out as much as possible. He also lent his voice to a collection of audiobooks he was working on as well as performances of the Golden Days of Radio Players at the Dietrich Theater. One of his favorite pastimes was happy hour in the pavilion overlooking the pond, listening to music and playing trivia, at which he was very adept.

A connoisseur of gadgetry and anything computer, he loved building, tweaking, upgrading and futzing with anything electronic. If it was new and cutting-edge tech, he wanted it, and for the most part, he got it. The fact that he could never part with anything meant that in addition to his formidable mountain of apparel, countless hard drives, cases, monitors, speakers, microphones, motherboards, printers, software, keyboards, mice, etc., he also left behind enough wires and cables to circumnavigate the globe...twice.

Steve was a friend to all living things. He loved cats and dogs, and the feeling was always mutual. If you were a nasty, bipolar, schizophrenic, evil cat (you know who you are), Steve was the guy whose porch you should be sitting on, because he would surely take you in. But he was also a friend to anything that squirmed, crawled, slithered, skittered or flew. He would spring into action to intercept a person wielding a shoe, flyswatter or newspaper in the direction of a wee beastie, whisk it from certain annihilation and gingerly set it free outside.

The world has lost a dear friend, a gentle spirit, a soothing voice and a natty dresser. Hopefully, he is finding his new accommodations and wardrobe to his liking, and that he can quell the urge to go around asking everyone if they need anything ironed. The thought of leaving all of his shoes behind likely kept him living long after the expiry date that his cardiologist and oncologist had given him years ago. And we're glad he did.

A celebration of life will be held in the spring, where he will be buried, as he wished, under a silver maple near the pavilion, overlooking the pond where happy hour will never end.