Endowment honors insurance guru, 100
Local businessman Myron Steves celebrated his 100th birthday in July.
Saying that Myron Steves knows a lot about insurance is an understatement.
Steves is a Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter, a designation held by less than 5 percent of the insurance professionals in the United States.
He earned the designation in 1949 and moved from Mobile, Ala., to Houston just two years later. Steves began teaching CPCU courses at the University of Houston-Downtown and, in 1955, founded the managing general agency and insurance wholesaler Myron F. Steves & Company.
Steves retired from the company in 1989, leaving it in the capable hands of his daughter and two sons, who recently established the $250,000 Myron F. Steves Endowed Directorship at the University of Houston-Downtown’s Insurance and Risk Management Center in his honor.
“We’ve been very lucky in the business, and in the last two to three years, they’ve been lucky,” Steves said. “So not only did they want to start an endowment, but they could afford to do so.”
In the years since his retirement, Steves has devoted much of his time to genealogy and has traced his family all the way back to Colonial America. What he’s found in his genealogical pursuits has allowed him to join numerous organizations, including the Sons of the American Revolution, the General Society of Colonial Wars and Little Bighorn Associates, and when he was 95, he declined an offer to become the president of the Paul Carrington Chapter of the Texas Sons of the American Revolution.
Steves celebrated his 100th birthday in July with a party attended by more than 300 friends, family and associates from the insurance industry, various genealogical groups and the ballroom dancing community.
He says that before an old leg injury forced him to take it easy, he and his wife, who died in 2002, were active ballroom dancers.
Although he doesn’t do much fancy footwork these days, Steves still belongs to two Houston dancing clubs and attends their dances throughout the year.
“I just get up and kind of mosey around now, but I used to do the kind of stuff that you see on the dancing on TV,” he said.
For more information on the Myron F. Steves Endowed Directorship, call the University of Houston-Downtown’s Insurance and Risk Management Center at 713-226-5552 or visit www.uhd.edu.
ABOUT MYRON STEVES
AGE: 100
OCCUPATION: Retired insurance professional and educator
COMMUNITY CONNECTION: River Oaks resident
FAST FACT: Steves graduated from Emory University in Atlanta
