I knew Steve Campbell more through his words than his face, especially more recently, but he’s been a fixture in my life since I was a kid .

The legendary knower and teller of all things Prince Edward County left us recently and it seems like I’ve been drawn to his words even more in his sudden absence. All I can say is this: at the root of everything he penned was love. Love of and for this place, Prince Edward County, and everyone and everything in it. 

That said, Steve Campbell could slice, dice and eviscerate with the best columnists and do so in a way that kept his reader laughing to themselves all the way through to the last sentence.

I’ve cracked the spine of The County Handbook more than once since his passing. It should be required reading both for anyone considering moving to Prince Edward County, and locals who constantly complain about people moving to Prince Edward County. Steve is very much an equal-opportunity offender in this “witty and wicked primer to Prince Edward County life.”

Newbies and old-stock residents alike are firmly within Steve’s crosshairs through the humour that made his County Magazine’s “Tales from the Back Page” columns legendary.

If Council won’t mandate Steve’s screed as a prerequisite to planting roots here, maybe we could form our own Welcome Wagon and have the Handbook as the centrepiece to a gift basket. By the way, would you be shocked to find out Welcome Wagon Canada ceased operations earlier this year? What are they going to do with all those tiny jars of jam, fruit cakes and coupons for discounted oil changes?

In terms of nutritional value, Welcome Wagon fruit cakes provided only slightly more sustenance than boiling down those coupons into a soup.

The last paragraph is an attempt to be a little more like Steve Campbell. It’s inspired by the words of his niece, Natalie Williams, At Steve’s celebration of life, Ms. Williams offered an incredibly touching send off for her Uncle Steve. She said the world needs more Steve Campbell. So if you like my attempt at humour in this column, you can thank her. 

I mentioned at the top of this column that I knew Steve better through his work, but that’s not to say we didn’t share a moment or two “out on the trail.” In 20 years of scribbling for Canada’s Oldest, our paths crossed numerous times. We’d dish about life at our respective word factories — “The bad old days” is how Steve described his time as a cub reporter at the Picton Gazette. And boy, did he have war stories.

By its very nature as the primary news outlet for Prince Edward County, the stodgy Gazoo of the 1970s stifled all of Steve’s creative thought and inspiration. The breakout was magnificent. County Magazine was Steve’s fountain. It vaulted him from the news writing he found to be mechanical to engaged storytelling delivered in Countyese: winding, witty and whimsical prose delivered to a dedicated readership that hung on every one-liner, jab, keen-eyed observation and self-deprecating dig.

I also remember Steve even before our Gazette days, as someone who held court at family functions. For those unaware, Steve’s first wife Marlene was a Parks, my dad’s first cousin. Thinking back to some early family gatherings, I remember this hilarious guy with glasses, my cousin Ginny’s dad, at the centre of hearty hilarity and great guffaws. I dearly wish I could remember the contents of those gatherings but I’m betting they were a living, breathing Back Page column.

“I remember most being in a room with Uncle Steve and thinking he was fascinating, and he made everything more interesting just by being interested in it,” Natalie said. 

“Steve made the world lovelier because he loved it so much.”

Her eulogy made clear that the Campbell writing gene has been passed on to Natalie, who noted that Steve’s secret to success was that in a world where everyone wants to be interesting, her uncle was interested.

A lifelong learner who found the whole world — and particularly this corner of it — interesting, Steve offered a really big, transformative kind of love.

That is what makes the loss of Steve Campbell so incredibly untimely.

“Because that’s exactly the kind of love the world needs, especially right now,” she said. “I think that the best memorial we could build to Uncle Steve would be to love the world a little bit more like he did. 

“We’ll never be him, there will never be another Steve Campbell.

“But we can learn from the way he loved. With curiosity. With interest. With care and thought. With an open and generous heart. With the eye of a storyteller, always looking for the human element, always watching for the details, always interested in what was important to people, even the parts we might never understand.

“And I think if we could love a little more like that, we could very quickly become the best story that Steve Campbell ever told. And that would be saying something, wouldn’t it?”

Indeed it would, Natalie.