Hail and Farewell, Steve! Colleagues and Friends Highlight Their Favorite “McCurleyisms”

So much has been said about a great pioneer in our field. I first met Steve when I was directing a Volunteer Center and he was on staff at Volunteer - the National Center, so we go WAY BACK. Steve's writing and training has had a tremendous impact on my career and on so many others in our "profession". I can't believe he has shared his last brilliant thoughts. I will always remember his talk to a hospital group sharing stories of his mothers chevron stripes for her many years of service. I still don't know if he was fabricating the story or it was about his mother. I will miss the chats outside our training rooms as we imagined no one showing up! Thank you for your tremendous contributions to the field. Wish we had a stage to give you a fond farewell but, knowing you, this would be your preferred style of departure. Take care and enjoy lots of new adventures...and perhaps a bit of volunteering! All the best!

I started as a volunteer coordinator in 1981 and Steve was there. We met at my first AVA conference, forgive me for not remembering where it was. But I knew him before i ever met him from his writing and visionary thinking. His work as well as the work of other leaders in the field (most of which have already written their testimony above) was just what I needed to learn how to be a leader of volunteers, how to engage volunteers in my work, how to stay current in the field, and how to have a 31 year career helping people help people. What a ride and what a blessing Steve's work has been. I know that I am better for it as is the field of volunteer engagement. As for McCurleyisms, who could forget Steve talking about the elder hospital volunteer with all of the chevron's on her sleeve! I can still giggle remembering how he told this illustrative story. Thank you for being a leader of leaders. Your work and your contributions to volunteerism around the world will not be forgotten.

Although not a close personal friend of Steve's I felt compelled to write about the visceral reaction I had to the news of Steve's retirement. Imagine a brick that has broken away from the morter that connects the brick to several others that form a foundation. This was my visualation. My thoughts framed around preserving the integrity of the foundation in volunteer management that I have come to rely on over the past decade. Reading the posts above from all of the others that are bricks in the volunteer management foundation of strength, I've come to presume that Steve has been creating a succession plan his entire career through the books he has written, the trainings he has developed and through his retirement. Steve is stepping down to create room for new and innovative strategies in volunteer management from future generations while preserving the years of wisdom he has so graciously shared. With that said, best wishes in your retirement! You will be missed but never forgotten.

Gee, you'd think about 30 years that I'd have realized that Susan's notion of "let's do this quietly" was somewhat different from mine. So, I have only one reaction to all of the above, cheerfully misquoting Mark Twain: "rumors of my sainthood are greatly exaggerated." One of the many reasons that I like volunteering is that it allows people to spend time on things that really matter to them and that they enjoy. Most people aren't fortunate enough to have a career that allows that kind of enjoyment - I was. Now I get to spend time doing other things that I enjoy, happy in the knowledge that a lot of equally competent and dedicated people stand ready to more than take my place. This is a good thing, and the way to make it more likely to occur is for some of us dinosaurs to occasionally make room for new brainpower. Thanks to all of you, both for the comments and for helping me have an entertaining and rewarding life.

Every field of endeavor has leaders who are respected, whose quiet but steady presence is accepted as the ordinary backdrop to the work. Steve has been such for my tenure in this field and I thank him for sharing himself, the wit, the knowledge, the curiosity and the steadfast assurance I, the professional and Volunteer Engagement, the field will be . . . better. As for a favorite McCurleyism: Nothing specific that he said or wrote for me, it is all about his presence - the deadpan delivery of a visually stimulating, heart-tugging story; or, that look that says" there's more here, do you get it?" Whatever your next chapter Steve, enjoy it fully!