He was always concerned like, 'I gotta go help people.' Those were his family values you do good with your family gifts that you've been bestowed.'
Friends and colleagues Dave Lang and Bobby Stone decided to venture out on their own in 1985 when they co-founded Atomic Films, and for the last part of their 30-year working partnership, which ended when Bobby retired in 2015, there was one rule that could not be broken.
“We couldn’t schedule anything during lunch on Wednesdays,” Lang said. “That’s when he went to lunch at Mount Vernon with his Nana [Margaret Finley]. She was in her 90s then. She died at 102. He looked forward to that all week. He’d come in on Wednesday mornings and call her and make sure she was going to be ready.”
Stone drowned last Saturday, and all this week leading up to a Friday church service and a later memorial at the Tivoli Theatre, friends and family have been trying to make sense of what happened to the man people have described as supremely smart, exceptionally compassionate and passionate, fiercely proud of the city he called home, kind and, very simply, nice.
In talking about his friend and colleague, Lang used all of those words and phrases and more.