Lasting a lifetime
RENFREW — C.K. Steckman and Sons makes products everybody needs, but few hasten to buy.
The company has produced memorial stones since 1926.
"Memorials: Nobody really wants to shop for one in the first place," said business owner and monument artist C.K. "Kip" Steckman.
From start to finish, a monument takes about six to eight weeks to produce and longer if the stones must be imported. Prices range from about $1,500 to "the sky's the limit," according to Steckman.
He caters to the other side of life with landscaping, garden and other decorative stones.
The business has stones ranging from baseball-sized rocks to hulking, 7,000 pound slabs. Natural river boulders, slab stone, limestone, quartzite, granite, sandstone, slabs, natural flagstone and sandstone boulders are all used as materials.
Steckman's grandfather, John Steckman, was an apprentice in Everett when he decided to open his own memorial business in 1926. He relocated to Ellwood City, west of Butler."There were more jobs to be had out here," Steckman said.The business passed from father to son, and when Steckman's father died, it was passed on to him and his older brother, John.John and 18-year-old Kip differed in their approaches to the family business. After doing some work for another company, Kip Steckman realized there were no monument manufacturers in Butler — only retailers. So, he parted with his brother and opened C.K. Steckman and Sons on Evans City Road in 1989."We had to do it from the ground up, and we had a pretty tough road," Steckman said.He likened the memorial industry to the funeral home business. Families tend to be loyal to a name they're familiar with, and word-of-mouth combined with caring, quality work is the best way to find and retain customers, Steckman said."It's a sacred area. You don't have buy-one-get-one-free sales," he said.Shortly after the move, Steckman introduced Rocks 2 Art to subsidize the memorial business. The side venture, which produces landscaping stones and decorative pieces, now accounts for about one-third of Steckman's business.Although he has employed up to six people at a time, Steckman's business is all in the family now. He works with his wife, Debbie; their daughter Kandi, 26; and their son Chip, 22.John Steckman still owns and operates Steckman Memorial Studios in Ellwood, as well as its subsidiaries.
Everything starts with the stones.Steckman has them shipped in from India, South Africa and China, among other places. Different stone quarries produce different colors of granite, the primary material in monuments.Importers in Texas and Maryland receive the stone, then ship them by truck to Steckman.Shape cutting is usually handled overseas because of low labor costs, but popular gray granite is quarried from a 10,000-year supply in Vermont."It took me 12 years and probably 15 or 20 quarries to find a supplier of consistent high-quality stone," Steckman said.He also said monument granite is a strictly regulated material — more so even than construction granite — because of the quality customers expect. The granite is pressure and heat tested to make sure it can withstand half a millennium of elemental beatings.The monuments arrive at C.K. Steckman and Sons as empty canvases, blank and rough."Everything I do feels like I'm doing art, not a simple monument," Steckman said.But designing, carving and polishing the stones is Steckman's art.
Once the customers have picked a design, Steckman begins by either hand drawing the piece and scanning it into a computer or designing it using computer-aided-drafting software."The reason we've got technology is not because the monument business sought it, but because technology people got into the monument industry," Steckman said.Once a monument is designed and the stone is picked, the work of physically creating the monument begins. Certain designs work better on one rock than another, depending on the particular contours and shape of the stone."The rock kind of tells you how to design it," Steckman said.Granite, porous by nature, is first polished much like a car, with progressively finer grit materials. It takes on a darker luster with the final polish using a felt pad, heat and water.Before the 1900s, marble and sandstone were more often used for monuments because they are softer and slightly easier to shape.Designs are added by chipping away the polished stone to reveal the rough, lighter granite underneath, and special dye can be added to color the etching."[Etching] is a tedious thing to do, and it takes me a long time," Steckman said. "If people saw the work that goes into monuments, they'd think we were nuts."Technology changes in monument manufacturing are uncommon. Although sandblasting was introduced for rougher designs about 20 years ago, computers entered the workplace 10 years ago, and Steckman now uses a diamond-tipped engraver for fine designs."I was doing hand-chiseling when I was a kid," Steckman said.Laser etching, produced by recreating a computer image, also has become available."I myself don't like that. I like a little artistic value," Steckman said.When creating someone's portrait in stone, laser precision and artistic value go hand in hand. So Steckman relies on the hands of Vladimir Konstantinovsky, regarded as one of the best monument artists in the field, to do the work."He does the portraits and all of my religious Madonnas," Steckman said. "I tried to do (a madonna) once, and it ended up looking like a biker."Konstantinovsky's 35 years of experience and skill are sought by monument builders across the country."He is the best. I've been using him for 20 years," Steckman said.
Whether it is a custom address marker or a mammoth monolith, C.K. Steckman and Sons has made it.For indoor use, the company offers crafted window sills and wall caps, fireplace mantles and hearths, flooring, steps and entrance ways.Outdoors, Steckman produces commercial work as well as monuments, such as the sign for the Connoquenessing School and the Korean War Memorial in downtown Butler."We do a lot of signage for housing plans," Steckman said.He is working on a memorial for the 307th Military Police Company, a U.S. Army Reserve Unit based in New Kensington to which Steckman's nephew beings, to honor its soldiers killed in Iraq.Steckman was back on his heels when he started his business in 1989."It was just me and my wife when we started, and we didn't have anything," Steckman said.He said the company does a lot more work now, and expansion could be in the future as the quality of the company's work gains recognition."I'm not the type of person who is going to worry about another hour's work if it is going to make the job look great," Steckman said.He said he wouldn't mind expanding his business beyond its 4-acre site, which includes a garage, workshop, showroom and office. The difficulty lies in hiring salespeople trustworthy of his customers and his name."A monument is a tribute to your family, so a lot of trust is involved," Steckman said. "I want our work to stand for itself."In Steckman's office, he is surrounded by photographs of other people's loved ones as well as his own. Pictures of their prized cars and favorite pastimes remind him of the sanctity of the products he makes that no one wants.They each celebrate an individual's life.
