It was a small article on the front page of the June 1967 Buckeye Barrister.
“The College of Law freshman class is missing a member this quarter,” the story began.
“Steve Renneckar has been in a hospital bed at Fisherman’s Hospital in Marathon, Florida,” it continued. “Steve was the unfortunate victim of a freak boating accident during the Spring break in which he lost both his legs.”
The story went on to tell how students at the College of Law had helped their friend.
Fast forward 30 years. The setting is a conference room in the College of Law. With strong arms, Rennecker, now a successful businessman and attorney in Arizona, practically bounds from his low-slung wheelchair to a soft chair next to the table. He exudes a confidence and an intensity that quickly makes a person focus on the man and not the handicap.
It is the first time he has returned to the College of Law in many years. With his wife, Louise, and daughters at his side, he talks about the event that changed his life.
“I was with a friend on a catamaran sail boat,” he recalls the spring break trip to the Florida Keys. What began as an idyllic break from the tedious study of law ended in tragedy as the aluminum mast of the boat struck a power line surging with 13,800 volts of electricity.
“The electricity came down the mast, through the frame of the boat and threw me into the water,” he recalls. He likens what happened to an insect becoming caught between the positive and negative forces of the florescent lights in a patio bug zapper. “Same idea, but bigger scale,” he notes.
He was the only one hurt in the accident. Over the next few months, he underwent four operations, requiring additional blood each time. Fellow students at the law school organized a blood drive to meet much of that need. His class also collected funds for a 10-inch color portable television, bought at cost from Lazarus Department Store and shipped to Renneckar in Florida by Eastern Airlines, according to the Barrister story.
Barely missing a beat, Renneckar returned to Columbus that fall and classes at the College of Law. He still had to re-take many of his first-year classes, but his dip in the waters off the coast of Florida hadn’t dampened his drive and determination to succeed. The accident and his handicap seemed to be no more than a speed bump on the highway of life.
He met Louise while he was in law school and she was an undergraduate student at Ohio State. They married in 1970, the same summer he was graduated from the College of Law and took the Ohio Bar exam. Almost immediately, they packed their bags for Arizona, where the climate and housing were more conducive to life in a wheelchair, his only concession to the reality of being handicapped.
The couple now lives in Tucson with their daughters, Stephanie, 19, a freshman at Arizona State University, and Darby, 17, a junior in high school.
“The accident pushed me to Arizona,” he says. “Arizona is where I came across the opportunities. Obviously it’s a different path, but it’s the same direction. I don’t think I became a different person.”
As vice president-general counsel of SunChase Holdings Inc., he is part of the management team, overseeing the day-to-day operation of subsidiaries around the world. (The Phoenix-based company owns interest in 75 companies around the globe.) It’s a long way from negotiating a wheel chair through icy parking lots in north Columbus.
He’s grateful for the education he received at Ohio State. “I think the most important thing is that it taught me to think,” he says. “I don’t use the mechanical skills (I learned in law school), but I do use the ability to think,” he adds.
And that, perhaps, was his reason for entering law school in the first place. It wasn’t a desire to practice law or to command a big salary. He saw it as a valuable experience.
Louise recalls he posed a question when they got married. “He said, ‘does it matter to you if I practice law or if we travel selling my woodworking?”’ Through the years he has not only practiced law, he has owned a Baskin-Robbins ice cream store, lived in Saudi Arabia, served on the town council of Oro Valley, Arizona, and yes, sold items he made in his wood shop at arts and craft shows.
“It’s really a varied path,” admits Louise. “There are many different things he has done, but the common denominator is the law degree. If he had not had that, all of this wouldn’t have happened.”
Credit: The Ohio State University Law Record by the College of Law Alumni Association – Summer 1997