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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, 44, 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."

Profile published in THE NEW YORK TIMES on September 9, 2002.