Stephen Dana Veirs : Found excitement, challenge in living
Posted on Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Whether he was a young man, taking weeks-long road trips with his family, or in his 70 s, snorkeling with marine biologists around the Great Barrier Reef, Stephen Dana Veirs was sure to find excitement.
Veirs, a longtime Little Rock resident, was the type to find challenge in everything, said his friend and former Dillard’s co-worker, Joe Story, even if he looked no farther than his own kitchen.
“He could do anything he tried,” said his daughter, Christine Ringgold. “Mother was making a pie, and he decided that he could make a pie better, so he pulled out the ingredients and baked one.”
Veirs, 90, who died Sunday of mesothelioma, grew up in Canton, Ohio, and attended Ohio State University twice — once before World War II, when he was an officer in the Corps of Engineers, and once after, earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the university. Later he helped found the American Institute of Industrial Engineers.
After graduate school, Veirs taught at Ohio State briefly before making a move into retail with Federated Department Stores.
While in Ohio, Veirs worked on a number of projects. He belonged to a team that designed one of the earliest computer systems, a machine that filled an entire room. As a member of the project, Veirs advised the computer designers of the efficiency needs of the department stores for which the computer was intended.
“A bunch of those guys would sit around the living room discussing and arguing about that computer,” said his wife, Dorothy Whipple Veirs. “Someone would say, ‘It’s got to be voice controlled,’ and somebody else would say, ‘No, no, its got to be this or that. ’”
Occasionally Veirs’ family became guinea pigs of sorts for projects he was working on.
“As a kid, we had an early dishwasher,” said his oldest son, Stephen Veirs Jr. “They’d measure hot water usage and compare the bacterial count to the stuff we washed by hand versus what we washed in the dishwasher.”
An eff iciency expert by training, Veirs spent much of his early career working on a motion-and-time study, which, in short, aims at increasing business efficiency by increasing productivity while minimizing actual labor.
Veirs, who moved to Arkansas in 1964 when recruited by William Dillard, founder of Dillard’s, had an odd, dry sense of humor, his friends and family said, and could often come across as gruff.
“Steve was military,” Story said. “He demanded a lot out of the managers but didn’t necessarily want to make people work harder but wanted to make them work smarter.”
Even as a young man, Veirs preferred organization and efficiency, his daughter said.
“When he was about 18, he and a friend canoed for like four days, and he kept a whole journal of what they purchased to make the trip,” his daughter said. “So we have a whole journal that’s like ‘peanut butter was X number of cents, the bread cost X.’
“ He was a planner. Every time we took a trip he had the whole itinerary planned out.”
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