Stephen Boyd Amador Jr. Obituary
Stephen Boyd Amador Jr., 50, of Sanford, Florida, passed away Monday, October 30, 2017. He was born July 7, 1961 (sic) in New York and raised in Bay Shore, Long Island, graduating from Chaminade High School in Mineola. His father was an executive with ABC. Entering Cornell University in the Fall of 1979, he was initiated into Pi Kappa Alpha and Alpha Theta fraternity in 1981. As an undergraduate, he served as his fraternity’s house treasurer, active in establishing a capital fund for improvements to the house, and a retirement fund for the house’s long serving and adnired resident manager, Hugh S. Gibbs. After graduating with dual degrees in 1984 -- a Bachelor of Arts in quantitative economics and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering -- Steve continued at Cornell, earning a Master of Electrical Engineering in 1985, and a Master of Business Administration in 1986.
His business career incorporated progressively more involved strategic planning and marketing positions at various enterprises, starting with staff responsibilities in strategic planning and business development at Westinghouse (1986-1995), then successively, Director of Marketing, with Dominion Virginia Power (1995-1997); Evolving Systems (1997-1998); Telcordia / Bell Labs, later Ericcson / Nokia (1998-2002); Unisys (2002-2005); eOriginal (2005-2006); and finally, as Senior Director of Marketing at Open Link Financial (2007-2009).
In 2010, he “hung up the shingle” as the founder, CEO, senior principal, and managing director of Palm Coast Technologies in Sanford. There, he leveraged his corporate expertise into business development and corporate strategy consulting engagements for a number of national and multinational corporations, primarily on telecommunications and cell phone marketing with such deliverables as improving product positioning, strategic planning, refining new product launch processes, research, planning, branding, channel development and management, public relations, analyst relations, and integrated traditional and online marketing campaigns.
Starting as an undergraduate and more so as an alumnus for at least the last thirty years, there has been probably no other member of Pi Kappa Alpha at Cornell more dedicated and involved as a director and treasurer of its Alpha Theta Alumni Corporation. Anyone involved in controllership and budgeting knows it as a thankless task of allocating and optimizing scarce resources, reconciling the often irreconcilable with an annoying “no”, or acting to get things done as the void filler for others, especially when some of these others saw no void needing to be filled. But year in and year out, Steve rose to the challenge.
A committed evangelical, Steve was a communicant at the Central Baptist Church of Sanford, Florida, and served as chairman of its Endowment Committee. Well versed from his Roman Catholic Marist prep school training in Old and New Testament theology, he relished a robust debate with his numerous friends of all faiths on pressing issues such as LGBT, womens’, and First Amendment rights, the proper contemporary roles of church v. state, and secularism v. spiritualism.
He was an avid weight lifter, who continued his love of working out and weight lifting both locally and nationally, being able to press 400 pounds.
Steve is survived by his mother, Dorothy Thomasina Amador of Sanford, and was predeceased by his father in 1972.
