Judge William Steger and Spitfires
Posted by BrandyWinn on July 13, 2010
One of the more interesting aspects of my job is learning about the lives of the people who lived in Tyler and Smith County. The University Archives and Special Collections Department has documents donated by people whose life experiences run the gamut of political life, from national to local politics. One of these people was a federal judge in Tyler, Judge William Merritt Steger. Judge Steger proved to be a fascinating person he was a United States District Attorney, ran for governor of Texas and United States Congress, and was appointed to the federal judgeship after a successful year as Texas State Republican Party Chairman.
Judge Steger died in 2006, and in his honor the federal courthouse was renamed for him. When I came to work in the archives in December of 2007, one of my first duties was in assisting in the creation of a permanent exhibit for the renaming ceremony of the William M. Steger Federal Building and United States Courthouse on May 9, 2008. We were given two attorney rooms, a long hallway outside of the first floor courtroom, and a kiosk built specifically for exhibiting ephemera he collected throughout his life in the lobby. I worked mostly within the two attorney rooms, creating information panels on his personal life for one and his political life for the other. Each panel depicted a separate time period or important aspect of his life. What I found to be the most interesting was his service in the United States Army Air Forces in World War II. He flew 36 missions in Italy during the war and believed that his airplane, the British Spitfire, was one of the best war planes that the allies had. In his papers are letters from superior officers, newspaper clippings, photographs, other memorabilia, and pilot’s logs that have an accounting of fellow pilots who were lost in battle. Below is a copy of the panel on display at the Federal Building and a photograph of one of the British Spitfire models Steger collected:
From the William Merritt Steger Papers at The University of Texas at Tyler University Archives and Special Collections, Box 19
On July 12, the National World War II Museum posted this article on its social networking page:
http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2010/07/09/Corn-maze-honors-WWII-Spitfire-pilots/UPI-61021278715830/
I’m posting these links in honor of Judge Steger, even though he was not in the Battle of Britain, which the subject of these articles commemorates. It is a reminder that exceptional people live in the places which we think of as plain and ordinary. Let us never forget the people in our community who do extraordinary things.
Further information:
The inventory for the William Merritt Steger Papers at The University of Texas at Tyler can be found here:
http://library.uttyler.edu/archives/findingaids/uascms003.htm
. . . or just click on the photo of the Spitfire above.
