Visitor to many campuses isn’t seeking one to attend

By Charlotte Hsu (contact)

Friday, Oct. 10, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Tiffany Brown

Steve Lake has visited 499 college and university campuses across the country, collecting a variety of keepsakes along the way.

Steve Lake, 58, of Summerlin, is a repository for obscure information about four-year colleges, a product of having visited 499 of them.

He knows, for example, that students at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., can drop by their president’s house on campus to request to walk his two Irish setters. At Soka University of America in Aliso Viejo, Calif., Lake learned that campus chefs cook meals using home recipes students suggest.

On Monday, Lake will wrap up a decades-long tour of higher education institutions by journeying to San Antonio, where Our Lady of the Lake University, a Catholic school of about 2,600 students, will welcome him with a ceremony and plaque commemorating his visit.

A student will sing the national anthem. The university president will give opening remarks. And Lake, a casino floor supervisor at Caesars Palace, will have accomplished his mission of hitting 500 campuses.

“It will be good to see my husband relax for a while,” says his wife, Caroline, a travel writer and retired make-up artist who sometimes tags along on college trips. In 2004, she declined to accompany him on a one-week tour of 40 schools in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio.

“He’s slightly obsessive about things,” she says.

“Slightly,” he repeats. “Of course, you have to be to do things like this, to be successful.”

The love affair with colleges began in 1984, during Steve and Caroline Lake’s New England honeymoon. They visited Harvard University and other schools, admiring the architecture, landscaping and history.

“I declared to Caroline that these schools were nothing like the university I graduated from in Montreal, which was more like a 12-story office building with no campus whatsoever,” Steve Lake says, referring to Sir George Williams University.

Over the years, the Lakes found joy in more than bricks and mortar.

At Wellesley College in Wellesley, Mass., they attended a women’s rugby match and had their pictures taken with a bride and groom, a Brazilian couple, on campus. At Yale University, they met Sidney Altman, a Nobel Prize winning professor of chemistry and distant relative.

Yet the journey was always more than a leisurely college sampler. It was a quest.

“I’ve been that way my entire life,” he says. “I’ve always set goals.”

As evidence, note that he has been to every state capital and, as of 1997, had watched a game at every major league ballpark in existence at the time.

“We kind of minor in a couple other things, like we minor in zoos,” he says. “At my last count, we’ve seen 27 zoos. And that’s not something I really tend to pursue.”

Ray Lindstrom, 66, a longtime friend who will join the Lakes in San Antonio, says Steve Lake “would always like to tally things. He would say, ‘I’ve visited my 28th major league ballpark. How many countries have you been to?’ ”

Such counting might seem like a strange compulsion. The best explanation Lindstrom offers is that Lake “is a different kind of guy, in absolutely the best sense of the word ... He has so much determination.”

Lake checks off the U.S. schools he’s toured in a 3,000-plus-page book of colleges that is so worn that its cover is missing, its pages curled. He’s also visited some outside America.

The the list will end at 500. Goal achieved.

“People do ask me, ‘What are you going to do now?’ ” he says.

He would like to visit ballparks built after 1997 that he has not yet seen but has no other travel goals, except to take more trips to foreign countries.

He’s taken 17.