ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times

DATE: Thursday, March 14, 1996               TAG: 9603140058
SECTION: SPORTS                   PAGE: B-1  EDITION: METRO 
COLUMN: Jack Bogaczyk
                                             TYPE: NEWS OBIT 
SOURCE: JACK BOGACYZK

NEWSPAPERING LOSES A MEMBER OF ITS ALL-STAR TEAM

There is a big basketball tournament beginning today, but if we had filled a pool in our office Wednesday, it would have been only with tears.

We lost one of our former point guards. He wasn't big, but he was a star.

There is a notion in our business - a portion of it true - that newspapering and its people have changed in recent years. Well, newspapering has. Fortunately, not all of its people have. Tony Stamus was an old newspaperman.

Except he wasn't old. Tony died Wednesday afternoon, at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, from complications relating to thalassemia, an anemia that strikes some people of Mediterranean descent. Life isn't fair. Obviously, neither is death.

He was only 40, but it seems as if he were around forever. That's because, for many of us who work at the building on the corner of Second and Campbell, he was. He came to work here in November 1972, while still a teen-ager and student at Northside High School.

He and classmate Randy King were sports copy boys for The Roanoke Times, when there still was a World-News - and when there still were copy boys, paste pots, hot type and telecopiers. The late Newton Spencer, as superb a mentor as these guys could have had, never called them Tony and Randy. They were ``Buster'' and ``Slave.''

Not many people in the sports department - or elsewhere at the newspaper - called him Tony. To most of us, he always was and always will be Buster. He rose from running copy and photos to the composing room to assistant sports editor, but he remained the same Buster, although he did change cars from an AMC Pacer to a red Mazda RX-7.

He left our newspaper in May 1993 for Rochester, N.Y., then went to Atlanta , but he never really left Roanoke. He was a single guy devoted to his family, his faith, his hometown and, fortunately for us, mostly to newspapering.

Buster wasn't tall, but he was big on getting things right. He also was big on getting stories, and on finding a way to do this or cover that. ``Can't'' wasn't a four-letter word he used often.

We will remember him eating late nights after deadline at The Little Chef, or missing a spare in the Tuesday morning Kingpin League at Viking Lanes, or selling tickets for those great dinners at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church, or drinking a beer in the stands at Municipal Field.

Mostly, however, we will recall him holding a page for one more late box score before it went to the pressroom. We will remember his flying fingers on the keyboard minutes before deadline. We will recall his recall of some long-ago hometown hero, and how Buster always made sure that person's roots were mentioned when you read about him the next morning.

We also will recall the time one fellow employee didn't want to rise painfully early to work the afternoon edition's copy editing shift. He called Buster, and offered him $100 to work the shift. Buster, who had worked the night before, was on time - and on the money.

We remember his photo-gray glasses, his on-and-off mustache, his smile, his loyalty and even the high-rise curly perm he had for a time.

It is part of the legend of old newspaper men that they be surrounded by many tales - most of them true - about their careers. Buster doesn't come up short in that department. And, it's testament to his personality and popularity that although he primarily was a copy editor and headline writer and worked tirelessly indoors, so many of the people we covered and journalists in other cities knew him, as well.

We never really thought he would leave us almost three years ago. It was just as when the sad news came Wednesday. We didn't want to believe it. However, we all are better people - and better newspaper people - to have worked with Tony Stamus.

Not long after I started writing this column, not long after we heard Buster really was gone, our computer system went down for about 10 minutes. Maybe it was an appropriate moment of silence for him.

Buster wouldn't have liked that. It gave us 10 fewer minutes to get it done right.

LENGTH: Medium:   76 lines