Steve Newberry, GAL member and longtime friend of the guitar, passed away on August 8 from complications of multiple strokes. He is survived by his wife Virginia and children, who reside in Los Altos, California.

Steve Newberry was an interesting man, full of wisdom and contradictions, with an active mind and the multiple concerns of living life. At various points he was a mathematician, a computer scientist, a husband and father, a widower (in his first marriage), a reader, a staunch Democrat, a Daoist, a Catholic, a freethinker, a physicist, a philosopher, a teacher, a traveler, a marksman, a collector, a Jew, a fervent Republican, a luthier, and a guitar player. He could be difficult to get along with from time to time. But which of us isn’t? And not least of all, my God, but he loved the guitar!

Steve was a witness to the birth of American lutherie from the 1940s on, when the first seeds of what would become the American lutherie boom were sown by Spanish luthiers who transplanted themselves into the U.S., and their very first young American admirers and groupies. Steve was certainly one of these. He seems to have begun his love affair with the guitar while in his teens. He wrote of his formative experiences in an article in AL#66 (Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Six), about his youthful observations about and in the shop of Vicente Tatay, one of the first Spanish guitar makers to have settled in New York. It’s one of the best human interest articles I’ve ever read.