John's arrest record is long and tedious - consisting mostly of convictions of being disorderly, stealing, trespassing, loitering in front of liquor stores and drinking in public. John plundered from his neighbor's trash. He stood outside his wife's house and screamed profanities at her until she, too, got fed up and called the police.
Jane was 18 when she met John at the old Mayfair Theater on Howard Street. She went to see a John Wayne movie - she thinks it was The Quiet Man - and in a bold move for the time, he sat down next to her. They were married less than a year later, in 1957, and had three children and six grandchildren. "We were like any young kids," Jane said, "in love and thinking things would get better."
John had joined the Navy in 1956 and served for three years, including a stint on the USS Lake Champlain, first as a cook and then loading ammunition into guns when the aircraft carrier was deployed to the Mediterranean. He returned to Baltimore and drove a truck. When he turned 38, John marched into the house and declared, " 'I'm not working anymore. You better get yourself a second job,' " Jane said. "And he never worked again."
Sixteen years later, when John's drinking and abusive behavior finally became too much, Jane told John to leave. He returned every so often to pick up his $150 check from Social Security, and sometimes he would stay a few days and then disappear.
John Steele was a neighborhood character. You'd mention that someone left a beer bottle in your planter, and someone else would say, "By the way, I saw John Steele the other day."
The news of his demise came slowly and through the same idle chatter, delivered in passing from rowhouse step to rowhouse step: "Oh, I heard John Steele died."
Neighborhoods all over Baltimore have their own John Steeles, and there's a story with each one. The stories are tragic and cruel, about people who can't get help or who don't want it, about people who once had something and now have nothing.
I smiled as I talked with John's wife. He had his share of triumphs and tragedies - he married his sweetheart and served in the Navy, lost his first daughter to a car accident in 1998 and his first grandchild to bone cancer in 1995. He escaped death twice, once on the aircraft carrier when he fell down an elevator shaft.
He chose to drink and to continue until it killed him. He had a wife who loved him and still does, but doesn't regret telling him to leave and doesn't make excuses for what happened.
"He had plenty of chances," Jane Steele said.
The last argument the couple had was what to do after they died. She bought a burial plot. He told her that if she died first, he would have her cremated and her ashes later combined with his. Now Jane is giving John's ashes to their son.
"I don't want to be a hypocrite," she told me. "I didn't want him in my house when he was alive, and I certainly don't want him in my house when he's dead."
But then she thought of the well-wishers, the old-timers from the Formstone rowhouses cluttering Clement Street who had stopped by to offer their condolences.
"They said he never said one bad thing about me."
