His father, Terrence William McQueen, a stunt pilot for a barnstorming flying circus, abandoned Steve and his mother, Julian when Steve was six months old. Steve was raised as a Roman Catholic and his mother, Julian, was a young, rebellious alcoholic at the time.
Unable to cope with bringing up a small child, she left him with her parents Lillian and Victor in Slater, Missouri, in 1933. Shortly thereafter, as the Great Depression set in, Steve and his grandparents moved in with Lillian’s brother Claude on the latter’s farm in Slater.
His mother, who had since married, brought Steve from the farm to live with her and his stepfather in Indianapolis, Indiana when he was eight years old. When he was 12, Steve moved to Los Angeles, California with his mother. There, he became involved in gangs and ended up in reform school.
In 1947, after receiving permission from his mother since he was not yet 18 years old, Steve enlisted in the U.S. Marines and was sent to Parris Island, South Carolina, for boot camp. He was promoted to private first class and assigned to an armored unit.
Steve saved the lives of five other Marines during an Arctic exercise, pulling them from a tank before it broke through ice into the sea. Steve served until 1950, when he was honorably discharged. After his stint in the service, Steve drifted around the country supporting himself with various menial jobs.
It was during this time that he took up motorcycling. His first motorcycle was a 1946 Indian Chief. In a 1971 interview in Sports Illustrated, Steve recalls that he was smitten by motorcycling from the start. By the middle 1950's Steve’s acting career began to take off and a decade later he had become the highest paid actor in Hollywood.
He was famous for portraying gritty characters in popular movies such as "The Magnificent Seven," "Hell is for Heroes," "Bullitt" and others. Despite his success as an actor, Steve didn’t shy away from motorcycling. Instead, he became even more active.
In the late 1950's, Steve and a group of friends took a risky motorcycle trip across revolutionary Cuba. Steve became so closely associated with motorcycling that Popular Science Magazine had him write a series of motorcycle reviews in the 1960's.
In early 1978, Steve developed a persistent cough. He gave up cigarettes and underwent antibiotic treatments without any improvement. His shortness of breath grew more pronounced and on December 22, 1979, after filming "The Hunter", a biopsy revealed pleural mesothelioma, a cancer associated with asbestos exposure for which there is no known cure.
A few months later, Steve gave a medical interview in which he blamed his condition on asbestos exposure. In late October 1980, Steve flew to Ciudad Juárez in Mexico to have an abdominal tumor on his liver removed, despite warnings from his U.S. doctors that the tumor was inoperable and his heart could not withstand the surgery.
Under the name Samuel Sheppard, he checked into a small Juárez clinic, where the doctors and staff were unaware of his actual identity. On November 7, 1980, Steve died of a heart attack at 3:45 a.m. at a Juárez hospital, 12 hours after surgery to remove or reduce numerous metastatic tumors in his neck and abdomen. He was 50 years old.
Photo attributions: Scuderia Ferrari Club Riga
