Steve Carlson had Sunday dinner with friends on his last night, and the conversation took a turn toward deeper themes as he explained how he met his wife, Claudia, who grew up down the street from him, and later married him at 20 and lived with him for 51 years, raising two deeply loved children, Ian and Theana. “Fate shaped my whole life,” he said. “How?” the friends asked. “The way I came to Santa Barbara, for instance,” he said. He applied to UC Santa Cruz. It was the cool school then, with people he might want to meet, up near Big Sur in the hippie late 1960s. No grades. But despite his own great high school academic record, Steven was turned down for Santa Cruz but allowed into UCSB.
Initially disappointed, he came here and lived through Isla Vista’s Strategic Hamlet Golden Years. He devoured English literature, particularly the poetry of Edmund Spenser and everything written by William Shakespeare. (He later worked at the university his whole employed life.) Then, Steve continued, sometime in his first college quarter, he got a letter from the UC system. There had been a clerical error and he was admitted to UC Santa Cruz, and he could transfer there when he wished. And why didn’t you go? “Simple,” he said. “Because I was living in Isla Vista and I had a lot of friends, and I loved it.”
On his way home from that dinner, Steve was killed by a drunk driver on Carrillo Hill.