We will miss Tom Steward’s voice at American Experiment

At our old office in Golden Valley, Tom Steward worked from a small desk in the mail room next to a very large (and loud) copy machine. Perhaps that was because he was a part-time writer for us. Or perhaps it was because he had a loud booming voice and when he was on a call with a source from some small town in Minnesota, the whole office could hear the conversation. When word spread through the American Experiment offices yesterday that Tom passed away, missing that loud booming voice emanating from his office (no longer in the mail room) was the overwhelming sentiment felt by all of us.

Tom was one of the good guys. He was the first person John Hinderaker hired when he became president in 2016, and the two of them began to change our organization from a think tank that created credible research and white papers to the most impactful conservative organization in Minnesota. Tom served as Director of Communications and built the early infrastructure that formed the basis of American Experiment’s rapid growth over the last nine years. He scaled back his schedule to part time in recent years, covering a local government beat and later providing most of the content for our North Dakota affiliate. Readers of Thinking Minnesota magazine will miss Tom’s quarterly column, and we will miss kidding him about the decades-old photo that accompanied his writing.

I first worked with Tom on Norm Coleman’s successful campaign for U.S. Senate in 2002. Tom transitioned from a long and successful career as a journalist into a guy who was finally able to voice his opinion and work for a man and a cause he believed in. As amateur writers, we valued Tom’s professional journalism background, and every new employee had to hear the story of Tom jumping from a helicopter to film a story because the pilot told him there was no place to land. His career highlights include covering the fall of the Berlin Wall, a George Foster Peabody Award and capturing the first footage in the wild of the endangered Sumatran tiger and Sumatran rhino for Animal Planet network.

I’ll remember Tom’s passion. “Can you believe that!” he would say in that loud booming voice, usually about some new initiative of the Met Council. And everybody who knew him understood two things: he loved his family, and he loved his church and faith. In our last text exchange I chided him for not delivering content from his hospital bed. “It’s called a laptop for a reason,” I joked. He got it but also shared several story ideas he was eager to write about, a testament to his passion for the cause.

Outside of work, Tom and I shared a love for cigars, and he gifted me a few nice ones from his large collection for a Boundary Waters trip I took in 2022. I’m going to think of him often when I enjoy a nice cigar.

Rest in peace, Tom. May perpetual light shine upon you.