Newspaper editors, for better or worse, often have a reputation for being blunt, hard-edged curmudgeons who move brusquely from one task to another, largely oblivious to the feelings of others. After all, when did you ever hear somebody say: “I’m losing sleep over my problems. If only I could talk to an editor!”

Stanley H. Eames Contributed photo

During my 40 years in newspaper journalism, I met several editors who exemplified that character template. The late Stanley H. Eames was, to his credit, not one of them.

Eames, who died Nov. 5 at 83, was a beacon of courtesy, friendliness, serenity and humility. Those attributes are all the more remarkable when found in daily newspaper newsrooms, an environment that just as easily fosters the growth of less admirable traits.

Having spent his formative years in Hallowell, Eames graduated from the University of Maine in 1965 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. He then went to work almost immediately for the Daily Kennebec Journal in Augusta — about the same time I was beginning a three-year stint as a newspaper carrier, delivering the proof of Eames’ work to Augusta residents’ doorsteps.

From the start, Eames revealed a comforting vulnerability to his readers.

“If you have never been utterly bewildered, just start talking science with some of the outstanding Cony High School students,” he wrote in a 1966 story about Augusta’s public high school. “Brother, I’ll give 10-to-one odds you’ll walk out of the laboratory completely befogged.”

Eames seemed to assure his readers that, like them, he was no expert, so he and they might as well learn together about this subject.

Soon he had enough experience to help newly arrived reporters adjust to their new careers. Patty Ammons of Augusta, a retired former Kennebec Journal city editor, recalled benefiting from Eames’ guidance when she took a job at the newspaper in the late 1960s.

“My first week at the KJ was scary because I was the youngest person there,” Ammons said in a telephone interview, adding that she recalled having trouble assembling a column about Augusta-area events.

“Stan was the kindest, nicest mentor I could have had,” Ammons said. “It was just pure luck that he was sitting next to me when I was learning the ropes.”

Eames worked for the local newspaper until 1978, then spent many years in upstate New York, working for the Amsterdam Recorder and the Times Union in Albany. He returned to central Maine and his former employer in 1988, working as a copy editor. That is when Gary Hawkins, a longtime KJ sportswriter, got to know him.

“It seemed to me like he was always in a good mood,” Hawkins said, adding that the same could not be said of many other copy editors.

When another editor barked occasionally at Eames about some problem, Eames would shrug off the outburst, Hawkins said.

Philip Norvish of Waterville began working next to Eames in the 1990s, when the news desks of the Morning Sentinel and Kennebec Journal were combined.

“Stan was a lifesaver for me when I got hopelessly entangled trying to build pages on deadline with a new technology called ‘pagination,’” Norvish said in a comment he submitted by email. “‘Let me finish that for you,’ he would say.”

Norvish, now retired, said Eames’ calmness had a positive effect on many of their colleagues.

“With his quick smile and laugh, he was a reassuring presence in the often chaotic nighttime newsroom,” Norvish said. “Everybody felt better when Stan was working.”

Norvish and his wife, Morning Sentinel reporter and columnist Amy Calder, hosted Eames one evening for dinner about two years ago. They had found a batch of Boston Herald newspaper clippings of stories written by a reporter with Eames’ name. Eames recognized them as his own father’s work, and his hosts gave him the whole batch.

“Stan left with the clips under his arm and a big grin on his face,” Norvish said.

When I started working at the newspaper in 1979, I heard Eames’ name often because he had left only a year earlier. I moved overseas in 1985, three years before he returned. Finally, we became work colleagues when I returned in 1998.

Eames brought a wealth of local knowledge to bear on his work. He enjoyed watching nature programs, and he was a fan of watching televised New York Giants football games — perhaps because he was a throwback to the era before the New England Patriots were founded, and Giants games were carried on TV in Maine — but I got the impression that he did not clutter his mind with much of the ephemeral claptrap that was available elsewhere on television.

Like others, I noticed his composure, as well as his understated wit. One night, he laid out a stand-alone photograph on a news page. It showed a tired-looking middle-aged man sitting outdoors next to an enormous pile of firewood that he had just cut and stacked. Over the photograph, Eames typed the headline “SPLITTING HEADACHE.”

The one thing that seemed reliably capable of breaking Eames’ concentration was the police scanner, which squawked, chirped and buzzed repeatedly throughout each evening shift. Who knows what would have happened if Eames had encountered the scanner’s inventor in a dark alley one night?

When Eames retired nearly 20 years ago, I thought about recording an hour’s worth of police scanner announcements on a CD and presenting it to him as a going-away gift, but I never got around to it. Or maybe I chickened out.

In any case, Eames did not stay gone long. He returned for several more years of part-time editing work, maintaining his well-deserved reputation for civility and dignity.

The vast majority of people — plumbers, accountants, taxi drivers, bartenders or some guy who makes specialty machine parts in his garage workshop and sells them online — do not get accolades in the newspaper after they die. Even most newspaper journalists do not get that treatment, unless they reach the stature of, say, World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle or the late Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee.

But for every luminary in the field, there are a few others quietly working in the trenches, both on the job and in the world at large, leaving the rest of us better and more effective for having known them.

Stan Eames was such a person. We will miss him.

Joseph Owen is a former night editor who worked at the Kennebec Journal for 25 years.