Steve Govoni was born in Manhattan and raised in Rye, close to the Playland Ice Casino, but playing hockey in a junior league founded by New York Rangers General Manager Emile Francis meant shlepping to rinks all over the metropolitan area. After graduating from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School, Steve wrote 50 articles for true-crime magazines edited by his father and started his newspaper career at the Stamford Advocate as a reporter-photographer. At the Bergen Record, he won a Deadline Award for an investigative series on the fraudulent demise of several trucking companies in New York and New Jersey. He also won a year-long Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism at Columbia University, which led to positions at Financial World and The New York Times magazines.
As imminent parenthood approached, Steve joined Morgan Stanley’s global equity research department as a supervisory analyst and was eventually recruited away by SBC Warburg, which moved to Stamford in 1997 and morphed into what is now UBS.
After his wife Kate died from a botched allergy shot in a doctor’s office with her son nearby, Steve became the founding president of the Connecticut Center for Patient Safety, a grassroots organization devoted to putting a human face on preventable medical error.
He also served on the board of the New York Financial Writers Association. In 2006, Steve moved to the “buy side” of financial services, first with the marketing department of Lord Abbett, then Virtus Investment Partners, where he retired in September 2023.
After 25 years in Rowayton, he sold his house to a 31-year-old cryptocurrency executive (in dollars). He and his wife Bobbi Arnold, a financial manager with Legal Services of the Hudson Valley, now live in Silvermine. In addition to hockey, Steve’s interests include golf (with a sense of humor), soccer, photography, theater, film, and art, all of which help explain why he sold the boat he moored at the Norwalk Yacht Club.
