Stephen Bunin: Bugs Bunny to Bob
Marley
"Stevie,
you know you're a strange person," Hyacinth Bunin would
say with great delight to her husband, Stephen Bunin. And
he graciously accepted the compliment.
Mr. Bunin, 45, was a systems administrator, a computer
guy, at Cantor Fitzgerald, but oh, that does not tell the
story. He was quiet enough, but made buoyant by his goofy
sense of humor. He was an inveterate Trekkie, a fan of
the Three Stooges and Bugs Bunny cartoons, and he spent
every summer Sunday wading into a Long Island pond to
launch his prized motorized sailboats. He was a nut about
foreign cars, and he was enamored of all things from the
homeland of his wife, Hyacinth: "I'm a Jewmaican!" he
would say.
He eventually became a Seventh-day Adventist, one of a
handful of white members of the couple's Queens church,
and was an easygoing, approachable man whom teenagers
sought out for advice. But Mr. Bunin also checked in with
his mother, Corinne, and sister, Kitty, almost daily,
celebrating holidays with them. An enduring image: Mr.
Bunin playing guitar and singing, awfully but with
earnest intention, Bob Marley's "No Woman No Cry."
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