Steve and I were inseparable in junior high and high school. Tennis, ping pong, photography, ham radio,
PDQ Bach, chorus, you name it. A true mensch. He will be sorely missed!
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How do you capture 40 years of friendship in a single story? There's no way to do justice to such a good man, but I know if you knew Steve, you already know that. :) We were students together, work colleagues, racquetball opponents, lunch companions, EV enthusiasts, & shared life's ups and downs over those 40 years.
Steve liked order. I like a little chaos. (I'm laughing as I type this.) Remember the old office dividers, on legs, that you could easily move around? I'd get into work before Steve & quickly knock the dividers out of perfect alignment, just so I could hear him mumbling about the night cleaners messing things up, as he put stuff back in order again. But one morning there was silence & he finally said, 'You're doing this, aren't you?'. Hahaha. So busted.
Once a month the engineering staff pulled an all-nighter as we built a new image for our product. Inevitably I'd head over to the local supermarket & grab snacks and trashy magazines to keep us all awake. Steven's favorite headline, ever, was from the Weekly World News: "Angry Bull Downs Helicopter". Of course.
I count myself lucky to have had my path intersect his. Blue skies, my friend. Much love.
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— with
Steve and I were soaring one day in my glider and I got a lucky shot of him. It was a great soaring day and we started in Scottsbluff Nebraska and got all the way to Chicago in one day.
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Begin forwarded message:
From: Stuart Cornew
Here is something he wrote about us:
An Unlikely Tale: Friendship, Serendipity and Karma, 1979 - 2024
Planning to attend my 5-year college reunion in Pennsylvania, I decided to compete in a regional gliding championship being held nearby the following week. I made a long distance call from my home in Colorado to a former physics professor at Swarthmore, Dr. Olexa-Myron Bilaniuk, who was also a glider pilot.
I had grown up in and around small planes: both my parents were licensed private pilots and we spent many a summer’s weekend at a little grass airstrip in the middle of a corn field in northwestern New Jersey. When I was a sophomore, Dr. Bilaniuk offered an Aeronautics course through the physics department, and I jumped on it.
Now, seven years later, I needed a favor. “Dr. Bilaniuk, I’m bringing a racing glider with me when I come east for Alumni Weekend in June. Are you still teaching an Aeronautics course? Do you have any students who might be interested in acting as my ground crew for the regional contest I’ll be flying the week after reunion?”
Armed with the name and a phone number he gave me I contacted Stuart Cornew, a junior in the engineering department at Swarthmore. Turned out he grew up flying gliders and airplanes in Mexico. Fast forward to today: Stuart and I have been great good friends ever since, sharing flying adventures over the decades and keeping in touch throughout our career-and-family years, even though we have never lived closer than 800 miles from each other.
In 2002 Stuart was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, an incurable blood cancer. The docs told him he had a couple of years to live. But they did not reckon with what a stubborn, intelligent, bullheaded advocate he would become for himself in his quest to beat the odds. I watched from afar as he went through countless permutations of chemotherapy and a couple of stem cell transplants: jumping at whatever he and his oncologist were able to come up with to keep him going. I’d see him, at best, once or so a year, watching in dismay as my fierce friend wasted away before our eyes. More than once, it seemed as though the disease or a hospital-borne infection or some other malady had him on his last legs. But after 20 years, medical advances finally brought a biological treatment option to the table, and the docs succeeded in pushing his cancer into remission through the miracle of CRISPR and Car-T therapy.
Through it all, he’d been an active serial entrepreneur living most of the time on the north side of Chicago: banking, hotels, big data, early AI. He and a friend at Northwestern University, the chemist Dr. Tom O’Halloran, collaborated to create CLP, the Chemistry of Life Processes Institute (https://clp.northwestern.edu/) CLP has in its first decade of existence nurtured important cross-disciplinary research projects and spun off a number of medical startups working to bring emerging technologies to the search for cures in diseases as diverse as ALS and cancers of various types.
In early 2019 I found myself with some stock sale proceeds to reinvest. I asked Stuart to recommend from CLP’s portfolio of spin-offs some place to put that money. One of the names he threw out was a startup called Monopar, still in the research phase, and so I ended up buying a tranche of MNPR stock at the company’s IPO offering that winter.
Throughout this period, I’d started using my airplane and piloting skills to give back to the community through the non-profit organization Angel Flights West, which pairs volunteer pilots like me with patients who live far from the specialty medical care they need and don’t have the resources to get to their appointments. A typical mission: say a child with cancer in a rural Montana town needs to travel twice a month to Denver Children’s Hospital for treatments. The drive is 12 hours one way, hotels are expensive, and her parents are already struggling to make ends meet before learning their child is facing a deadly disease. Their rural health care practitioner contacts Angel Flights West, which posts an online request for volunteers. AFW volunteer Command Pilots check the database of available missions and select one or more that match their availability and capabilities. Once assigned to a mission, pilots and patients coordinate directly, and the mission culminates in a three hour flight from a rural Montana airport to one a few miles from DCH, where an AFW volunteer Earth Angel drives them the last mile to their lodgings or treatment center.
It’s a great thing to help people in need, many of whom have never flown in a small plane and are both pleased and grateful for the experience and the way it simplifies their lives. And it cuts both ways: I got to meet some of the nicest people in terrible circumstances, people who remain surprisingly upbeat in the face of their difficulties. It taught me something, and was deeply gratifying.
Then, in August of 2023, it became my turn in the barrel. “Stuart, I’ve been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. I need your help navigating the system to organize a treatment plan.” I shared the results of the diagnostic tests and imaging with him, which showed that in addition to the primary tumor I had metastatic lesions, thousands of them, throughout my abdomen and lungs. To which he responded in typical Stuart fashion, “Boy, you don’t do anything by half measures, do you?” He came out to Colorado and helped Marcia and me navigate the rounds of testing and biopsies and scans, getting a second opinion, etc. Not only had he given me a shining example of dogged perseverance and good grace in living with his cancer for so many years, he put aside his other responsibilities and took on the role of cancer guide.
My care team recommended the most aggressive chemo regimen available, counting on the fact that I’d presented for diagnosis as soon as I knew something wasn’t right, and had started from a baseline of otherwise robust good health. They figured my body was strong enough to take the punishment. We put our heads together, Marcia and Stuart and I, and said go for it.
The first year of chemo was hard, but successful in keeping the cancer in check. I lost 40 lb., but after my oncologist was able to adjust the chemo cocktail to ease the burden on my body, my appetite returned, I started gaining weight, and most importantly I felt well enough to start traveling again: France, Lake Huron (twice), Germany, Kauai. It was glorious.
But with an aggressive cancer like pancreatic, chemo is but a stopgap measure. During this past summer, biweekly blood tests revealed that cancer antigens were on the rise, and in October a PET scan revealed a large metastatic lesion in my pelvis, accompanied by debilitating pain. It was at that point that Stuart , who’d been working his network of contacts in the medical space, watching out for promising new avenues of treatment, called me. “Remember that little startup called Monopar we talked about as an investment opportunity? They have this new radiotherapy treatment showing great promise in targeting a range of adenocarcinomas, including pancreatic. Let me call the inventor (Chandler Robinson, who is now Monopar’s CEO) and see what’s going on.” Turns out that when he was still a student of Dr O’Halloran’s at Northwestern, Stuart had taken Chandler for a flight in his glider and was still on a first-name basis.
At this Monopar’s treatment is purely experimental: I will be patient #2 to receive treatment under an FDA compassionate care exemption. Animal studies and early trials to determine toxicity and dosage ranges have been conducted, but no clinical trials in human patients have yet been done. Nonetheless, I’ve been approved to undergo treatment: we leave for Houston on Thursday for the initial work up and a marker infusion to reveal whether my cancer’s particular genetic flavor is a good candidate for the active treatment, a targeted radiotherapy using a very short half-life isotope. If the infusion this week shows that the novel marker agent Monopar invented lights up the metastatic lesions in my torso, then next month they’ll give me the first of three radiotherapy infusions. The radiotherapy infusion seeks out the marker (which has already marked individual cancer cells), attaches to the cell wall, and for a few days delivers beta radiation directly to the bad cells without irradiating the rest of the body.
That’s the hope and the promise. We be see.
Steve Zimmermann
Broomfield, Colorado
December, 2024
In response to "What always reminds you of Steve?"
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I will miss all the special times I had with my cousin Steve. I have flown with him since I was a young girl with his parents as the pilots. My husband Steve and I were lucky to be able to fly with him many times over the Rocky Mountains. I will always treasure going with him, Marcia and my Steve to Steamboat Springs for breakfast. May his spirit continue to soar!❤️ cousin Barb
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