Reading, Vt.
Titus, who died at 20 in a March snowmobile crash, wasn’t much for being inside. From his early days, he was more likely to be riding something with wheels, splashing in water or climbing trees with his black Labrador alongside. At 2, he often rode a play dump truck on his knees and by age 3 he graduated to a motorized, toy jeep.
Riding a tricycle in the backyard one day, Stephen flew down a hill and crashed in the driveway, resulting in a hospital trip and a Snoopy sling. He would leap from couch to couch in the house while making what his father, Jason, described as “pterodactyl” noises.
At 8, Stephen was riding a small ATV over jumps, his younger sister, Leah, crouched beneath them to take photos. A few years later, he fell from a tree stand and broke his arm. As a teenager, one ride on a larger ATV ended in a pond.
“His mother would look out the window and say ‘Oh, my God,’ but you’ve got to let boys be boys,” said Jason Titus, a logger who recalled his own need to be active and adventurous as a boy.
Wrote Stephen’s friend, Ben Orr, in an email: “Living fast and enjoying every moment he had on this earth led to an early departure. But his kind heart… was truly remarkable.”
Titus’ friendly spirit was evident in a succession of head-shot photos taken during his seasons with the Woodstock High football team. While other Wasps wore what they believed to be stern or intimidating expressions, No. 19 grinned broadly. He’s remembered for that outlook by John Kuhn and Julie Martin, whose son, Dylan Kuhn, was a friend and gridiron teammate.
The couple fondly recalled Stephen, smelling faintly of snowmobile exhaust, coming by to visit Dylan during the winter holidays after high school.
“The rest of the kids would be down in the basement, but he’d stay up with us a while and hang out,” John Kuhn said. “And he’d call Dylan on the phone and talk for an hour instead of just texting him.”
Titus was a complementary player on Woodstock teams that won three consecutive Vermont Division III football titles. A split end on a squad that mostly ran the ball, he was required to carry out fakes and block downfield, as well as shuttling in plays from the sidelines.
That last duty was troublesome because a learning disability made it difficult for Titus to recall and repeat phrases. His dedication and earnestness, however, was enough for his teammates to excuse those hiccups and for quarterback Zach Cole to conjure up his own choice when the coach’s orders were forgotten.
“Steve didn’t even like football,” said former teammate Oliver Kaija, now a college football and lacrosse player at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. “He wasn’t very good at it, but he played because he loved the guys. The idea of not being around his best friends, he wasn’t going to have that.”
Kaija and Titus were buddies dating back to preschool play dates in Reading, where Kaija said there were only six other members of their kindergarten class. Orr and Tom Baumann, who would also become Woodstock High athletes, joined the group in elementary school. By junior high, Titus employed his friends in a lawn-mowing and snow-shoveling enterprise in what passes for downtown Reading, where his family lived until 2011.
“We’d use the push mower and the weed whacker and Stephen would get the riding mower and take in 200 bucks and try to pass us each 10,” Kaija said with a laugh. “He always said he deserved more because his back was sore from riding.”
Hard work was ingrained in Titus from watching his father labor. Jason, who grew up on a Reading farm and graduated from Woodstock High in 1988, married Christina, a former program director and assistant director of the Woodstock Recreation Center, in 1995 and together they bought 60 hillside acres off Hagan Hill Road. Jason Titus hacked out a curving, gravel driveway that seems to point at the sky and that leads to a gorgeous log cabin home he constructed.
Stephen worked with his father from a fairly early age, but even in his later years, couldn’t quite keep up with a man who didn’t usually halt his unyielding pace for lunch. The son got fairly good at running some of the family’s logging equipment, but his parents had to remind him that trustworthy skill and experience take years, not months, to acquire.
“He would run out of steam,” Jason said with a small smile. “He’d say ‘Dad, I don’t know how you do it.’ ”
School was also challenging for Stephen but he got by with wit and an upbeat attitude. He sometimes wore a pronounced mullet hairstyle and took to dressing in Hawaiian shirts, cutoff jean shorts and various other getups that displayed his irreverence. Starting his junior year at Woodstock, he would spend half the day at the Hartford Area Vocational Center, where he excelled in welding.
With aspirations of becoming a diesel mechanic, Titus and Woodstock friends Sam Cole and Chris Flynn attended the University of Northwestern Ohio for their freshman year. Jason Titus said his son wasn’t enamored of the classroom study and unused to having so much downtime. The boys spent much of it playing video games in a small apartment and Titus was back home for good in the spring of 2015.
It was a restless time for the young man, and his self-confidence, somewhat limited because of his academic struggles, sank a bit more. He referred to himself derisively as a college dropout and told his sister not to turn out like him. That was a blow to Leah, who had long looked up to her older brother.
“He didn’t like himself; he didn’t think he was a success and he tried to hide it,” she said, sitting at the family’s kitchen table with tears in her eyes. “He felt like he was disappointing us and whenever something bad would happen, he would make it more of a big deal than it was.”
The truth was that Stephen’s parents were proud of him and often told him they loved him. Still, he desired not to be on the edge of manhood, but in its midst.
“He wanted so much so fast,” Christina Titus said. “He wanted to be his dad and to be as successful as him so badly. He wanted to be out of the house and not to live under the rules, but he was also very respectful.”
Said her husband: “There’s times (kids) think they’re grown when they have so much more ahead of them to learn. I told him a thousand times that I didn’t get here overnight and to put his time in.”
Titus stayed busy. He had long split wood, and he had employment stops at a nursery and for Andrew Pearce, running a lathe to make wooden bowls. He also helped around the small farm of Reading residents Garfield and Lucy Goodrum.
“He was the best of Vermont in many ways,” Garfield Goodrum wrote in a letter to a local newspaper after Titus’ death. “His comportment and the quality of what he did set him apart, whether it was cutting or cleaning a horse paddock, repairing fences or a motorcycle.”
Last winter, Titus picked up a job as a group leader for Killington Snowmobile Tours. Its Plymouth, Vt., location is run from Spike’s Place, a snowmobile shop along Route 100A that sells food and drink. When Titus’ pickup truck wasn’t running, he would take his family’s snowmobile to work, using Vermont Association of Snow Travelers trails and those he had cut himself to commute in roaring fashion.
The gig was a good one for Titus, whose manners and attentiveness impressed customers. He’d deliver about half an hour of safety and orientation information before leading groups on hour-long rides along some of the same VAST trails he used himself.
On March 18, Jason, Christina and Leah Titus headed to church around 10 a.m. Stephen was due to lead his first snowmobile tour at noon and be done with work around 7 p.m. His parents had grown accustomed to him arriving loudly home from work and sweeping his headlights through their bedroom as he pulled around the house. They said that sometimes, however, he would socialize late and then sleep on a friend’s couch.
Christina Titus awoke at 3 a.m. on March 19 and realized her son wasn’t home. She texted him but her smartphone indicated that he wasn’t in a service area. Calls to friends a few hours later brought no news, and a search was soon started. Stephen’s body was found three miles from his house, on the groomed VAST Trail 106, about a mile east of Brown School House Road. He had failed to negotiate a sharp turn and collided with several trees.
A state police news release, which indicated that speed was considered the “primary factor” in the crash, initially said Titus was not wearing a helmet, but it was later updated to indicate that he did have his helmet on. The news release didn’t address the issue of alcohol, but Christina Titus said she was later told by authorities that her son’s blood-alcohol content level had registered at 0.18. The legal level for adults who are driving is 0.08. At age 20, Titus was still under the legal age of 21 for obtaining alcohol.
“We are not perfect parents and we haven’t raised angels, but when that blood-alcohol level came back, it wasn’t just an accident anymore,” said Christina Titus, who has questions about where and with whom her son had been drinking. “We don’t want anyone else to go through this.”
Vermont State Police Sgt. Eric Hudson declined comment via email last week and cited the existence of an “active investigation” when asked about the circumstances surrounding Stephen Titus’ death.
The emotional outpouring after the snowmobile crash was far-ranging. At RPI, Kaija received a text from Orr in his geology class and staggered out to the hall, where he fell down in tears. Although Kaija remained at college for the next few days in advance of Titus’ funeral, he felt present in body only.
“For a while I was really angry at God,” said Kaija, who has one of Titus’ T-shirts pinned to the wall above the head of his bed. “All things work together for His glory? There was no way in the world that anything good was going to come out of this.”
Kaija spoke at the funeral, which drew more than 500 people. He visited the Titus house and asked to look at his friend’s room, which is decorated with snowboards, pinup girl posters, a wild turkey’s fan and a display case holding model trucks. A Members Only jacket and torn-up flannel shirts hang in the closet, along with one of two brown, striped turtlenecks that Stephen and Baumann wore so they’d resemble Sesame Street characters Bert and Ernie.
Last month, after Woodstock football practice, head coach Ramsay Worrell spoke about Titus in a growing dusk. Worrell worked as a recreation department playground supervisor for Christina when she was pregnant with her son. Worrell, who came up as an assistant to former coach Jim McLaughlin, always had a soft spot for the boy because of that connection. He sometimes smiled inside while chastising him for an untimely wisecrack.
“People used to ask Coach Mac what kind of team he had,” Worrell said. “He’d say to ask him in 10 years, when they’re family men and business owners. We’re not going to get to that point with Stephen. It’s heartbreaking.”
Tris Wykes can be reached at twykes@vnews.com or 603-727-3227.