In memoriam: Stephen Van Esen, Waterbury's 'silent mentor'

February 17, 2022 | By Cheryl Casey | Correspondent

Steve Van Esen at Waterbury's Town Meeting, 2011. File photo by Gordon Miller

Some might say it was the perfect match.

At a time of year when we celebrate and share love, it seems only appropriate that we acknowledge the love and commitment one man had to Waterbury and its future. 

Stephen Van Esen, who passed away—rather, “tipped over,” as he instructed family and friends to call it—on December 21 at age 85, moved to Vermont in 1977 after falling in love with the place while visiting for a ski trip. Having discovered his other passion, real estate, several years earlier, Steve combined his loves and established Vermont Realty Exchange in Waterbury.

A businessman first and foremost, according to those who knew him best, Steve recognized many of the possibilities Waterbury had yet to realize, given its location and proximity to destinations like Stowe, Burlington, Montpelier and the Mad River Valley. 

“A lot of what Waterbury is today is because of what Steve did,” said State Rep. Theresa Wood, D-Waterbury. Steve’s partnership with Ed Steele “poised Waterbury for what it is now and for its future,” she added.

Steele, who grew up in Waterbury and had become a successful businessman and developer in the area, was Steve’s business partner and friend. Together, they worked to rehabilitate and develop various properties in Waterbury, sharing a vision for putting Waterbury squarely on the map. To them, Waterbury was “a diamond in the rough,” explained Wood.

Waterbury Town Manager Bill Shepeluk remembered meeting Steve in the late 1980s and found him “a fairly aggressive developer” who “always seemed to be in Ed’s shadow.” As a “local boy,” Steele was well-known and well-liked, and behind the scenes was “where [Steve] liked to be,” said Shepeluk.

Wood referred to Steve as Waterbury’s “silent mentor” who “liked to have his fingers in a lot of things,” from being a founding member of the Waterbury Area Development Committee (now a subcommittee of Revitalizing Waterbury) to attending every meeting of the Waterbury Rotary Club.

Big ideas for a small town

One of the most significant of those things was the development of Pilgrim Park and the Green Mountain Coffee Roasters facility, in which friend Paul Willard called Steve “instrumental.”

In a 2016 oral history interview for the Waterbury Historical Society, conducted by Jane Willard, Steve dismissed any notions that he was particularly instrumental in that deal. According to Steve, GMCR owner Bob Stiller reached out to him in 1981, with “a very plaintive phone call on a Sunday afternoon.” 

Stiller had recently bought the beginnings of the coffee company, Steve recalled, and was trying to get things going in Waitsfield. 

Steve explained, “[Bob] wasn’t getting any help from Waitsfield, and so as a consequence, reached out a little further to Waterbury. The message said, ‘Do you know where I can find 1,500 square feet of commercial space?’ And needless to say, I couldn’t get back to him fast enough.” 

Initially, GMCR was located at 40 Foundry Street before eventually moving to the newly built larger commercial facility at Pilgrim Park in 1991.

Not all of Steve’s ideas for Waterbury were well-received, and Shepeluk noted that Steve was “underappreciated for that vision he had.” Shepeluk recalled one particular idea for a parking garage on Main Street next to the then-TD Bank building that would have moved the nearby municipal offices on the top floor. 

“Everyone, including I, told him that was the stupidest idea ever,” admitted Shepeluk. “But if we had done that, we wouldn’t have been flooded out of our space,” he added, referring to how floodwaters from Tropical Storm Irene in 2011 rendered the town offices a few doors away unsalvageable.

Would Steve’s plan have worked? “Probably,” Shepeluk speculated recently. “Now what do we have there? A parking lot you have to pay to use.”

Vision for the future, honor for the past

As Steve in his real estate dealings looked ahead to Waterbury’s future, he became more interested in learning about the town’s past. 

In the present, Steve knew Waterbury was perfectly located and had great potential for a robust economy. “He then realized that back in the day, Waterbury was also ideally situated” for business, tourism, and a thriving community, said Shepeluk. 

Friend Jane Willard recalled that after she interviewed Steve for the historical society’s oral history project: “Steve said, ‘I want to immerse myself in Waterbury history.’” 

And immerse himself he did, joining the historical society board of directors, conducting his own research, and collecting what Waterbury artifacts he could. By the time he tipped over, Steve had built quite the collection. Shelves in the front room of his home held binders of meticulously preserved and organized documents—from postcards and photographs to hand-written invoices—dating back a century or more. Old maps, architectural plans, and aerial photographs were framed on his walls or stacked next to the shelves.

In 2020, Jane Willard decided to bring Steve into a new book project that she was overseeing, along with Laura Parette for the Waterbury Historical Society. He co-authored a chapter about Pilgrim Park with longtime friend and assistant, Beverley Young, and contributed to the book’s preface. Titled “A New Century in Waterbury, Vermont: Stories of Resilience, Growth, and Community,” the book has just been published, and Steve was able to read the final manuscript. 

“He was so proud of the book and so proud to be a part of Waterbury,” said Jane Willard.

Just one of the locals

For decades, Steve was such a consistent presence in the daily life of the community and patron of the local businesses that lifelong local resident Wood can’t even remember when exactly she first met him. “For me, he’s just kind of been around for a long time,” she confessed. 

For many years, Steve and Ed Steele lunched at Arvad’s (now McGillicuddy’s), where Shepeluk would occasionally join them. Paul Willard would often meet Steve for a cup of coffee at Aztlan’s Foods on Foundry Street where owner Fred Dominguez would make Steve breakfast nearly every morning. Steve could also be found enjoying coffee and friends at the Waterbury Train Station or KC’s Bagels, or wine and friends at the Rotary Club’s summer Concerts in the Park.

Steve often used coffee hours to comment on local government. “He loved challenging the selectboard,” Jane Willard recalled. “He offered an informed perspective and was very interested in infrastructure.”

Shepeluk puts it more directly. “He didn’t suffer fools well,” the municipal manager said, describing Van Esen as not “impressed” with local government. “He wanted [government] to support business, but he participated from the outsider-looking-in perspective,” Shepeluk said. 

Wood likewise said she got frequent earfuls about what the state legislature should be doing.

The local man of mystery

Steve Van Esen in an undated early-career photo, courtesy the Waterbury Historical Society.

For all of his friends and connections around town, Steve could still be a hard man to figure out. And he seemed to like it that way.

Shepeluk admitted that he didn’t know Steve well for a long time. “I feel badly I wasted 25 years or so of my time,” he said. “I found he was an engaging, interesting person, and I regret that I didn’t get to know him earlier.” 

Wood said, “It was sometimes difficult to get to know who the real Steve was. He liked when people didn’t know what to make of him, and cultivated a sort of mysteriousness about him.”

Often, people were thrown by Steve’s sense of humor, which was wickedly off-color. Wood recalled how he would forward her jokes for her to share at Rotary Club in her role as sergeant-at-arms, and she usually couldn’t bring herself to retell them. “He was not a PC kind of guy and he didn’t care,” she laughed, “and you couldn’t always tell if he was serious. He liked the shock factor just to see what people would say.”

Paul Willard said, “I had a lot of interactions with Steve. Most everyday was lighthearted.” Jane Willard added, “He did love to laugh.”

At the start of his 2016 oral history interview, when Jane Willard asked where he grew up, Steve quipped, with a straight face, “I haven’t yet.” And then he burst into a boyish smile and chuckled.

Steve also loved flowers. Shepeluk recalled admiring for many years the banks of daffodils Steve had planted on Foundry Street. During her oral history interview, Jane Willard asked Steve what his favorite flower was. “You know, those white things they use at funerals,” he replied. Lilies.

Notably, every person interviewed for this article declined to share their favorite “Steve story” because they found it highly inappropriate for print.

Wood said that “Steve knew people perceived him as somewhat of a curmudgeon. But that wasn’t the true him. He cared so much.” 

Off-color humor or curmudgeonly persona aside, it seems the community knew how much Steve cared and it cared in return. Last year, when the Rotary Club organized a meal train for Steve convalescing at home after cancer treatment, many people volunteered, some even multiple times. 

According to Jane Willard, “The general meal train consensus was along the lines of ‘I really don’t know Steve too well, but I’d like to provide that nourishment.’” The generosity wasn’t lost on Van Esen, either, Jane Willard recounted. “Steve really benefited from that company, and he still had so much more to say” she said.

Born in Manhattan, New York City, on July 10, 1936, Steve grew up in White Plains, New York, graduating from White Plains High School. He started in his career as a photographer running a camera business in Manhattan in the 1960s which he sold when he moved to Vermont in the late 1970s, first to Moretown, according to his obituary. He later planted roots in Waterbury and stayed to the end, tirelessly working to polish and set the town as a crown jewel of Vermont. “He was wheeling and dealing until he wasn’t able to anymore,” said Wood.

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Steve is survived by his daughter Jenny Evjen and husband Ron of Hermantown, Minnesota, and grandsons Ethan Evjen of Boulder, Colorado, and Aaron Evjen of Hermantown; also his sister Penny Craig, of Ridgewood, New Jersey. A service will be arranged and held sometime this year. A full obituary is online at lavignefuneralhome.com.

Waterbury Center resident Cheryl Casey is an associate professor of Communication at Champlain College and president of the Waterbury Historical Society.