Rufus Stansell, practiced art of making friends

Rufus Stansell liked to survey the world from the front stoop of his Virginia-Highland apartment building. That’s where friends would sit and listen while he dispensed endless jokes and bits of wisdom.

Other times, he preferred the view from a rocking chair atop his garage. Along with the beat-up chair he lugged up there, he kept an old stoplight and two enormous brass swans he’d bought at a yard sale.

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Folk artist Rufus Stansell enjoyed his handmade creations. Sometimes he would prop up the sculpted likeness of himself in his apartment to startle strangers.

“He could see all of North Highland from there, and all of North Highland could see him,” said his friend Hunt Brown of Atlanta. “He didn’t mind being different at all. In fact, he sort of reveled in it. He was very confident of who he was.”

Rufus Henry Stansell Jr., 79, of Atlanta, died of cancer March 28 at Mr. Brown’s residence. The body was cremated. The memorial service is 4 p.m. today behind the apartment building where Mr. Stansell lived at 995 N. Highland Ave. Donald Trimble Mortuary is in charge of arrangements.

For years Mr. Stansell covered his apartment’s prominently positioned fence with folk art and other oddities he’d scavenged. Over time, it became a landmark in the neighborhood.

In the summer, he painted hydrangea blossoms orange and red and other bright colors, creating an irresistible subject for sidewalk photographers.

He constructed bird houses, whirligigs, animal figures and other sculptures, including a startlingly life-like one of himself that he’d prop in his front window to shake up strangers.

Here is how Mr. Stansell related the facts of his early life to his friends: He grew up in Birmingham. He decided to join the Seabees after he watched the John Wayne movie “The Fighting Seabees.” He served in Greenland, went AWOL to go ice fishing one day and had to be rescued when the ice he was standing on broke away. He lived in Las Vegas, Los Angeles and other cities that friends aren’t quite sure about. He earned a living as a television repairman and fixed a TV that Elvis Presley had shot at for fun.

“Rufus was a bit of a weaver of tales,” said his friend Loren Solomon of Atlanta. “Mark Twain was his favorite writer and one of Twain’s quotes is, ‘I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.’ It was kind of like that with Rufus.”

His friends didn’t care, though. In fact, they adored him.

Neighbors, Virginia-Highland business owners, artists, politicians, Meals on Wheels volunteers, and assorted friends of friends were drawn into his circle of admirers. They turned out in droves for his 79th birthday party in September and continued to care for him as lung cancer sapped his strength.

Mr. Stansell told friends he’d been married four times and that alcohol had been his undoing.

He settled in Atlanta in the 1980s, became sober and found work as a handyman. He never graduated from high school and looked as rough-hewn as his homemade artwork.

Yet he treasured his enormous book collection and was a devoted reader of The New York Times.

Visiting his apartment, Mr. Brown said, “was sort of like going into a very bizarre museum.”

On display: a stuffed duck, discarded disco balls and two dozen clocks that chimed the hour with Christmas carols or bird calls.

He assembled more than 600 jigsaw puzzles, mounted and framed them and kept them as art. They reminded him, he told friends, that life is a puzzle that needs to be put together one piece at a time.

For a lark, Mr. Stansell liked to don a cap, grab a clipboard and pass himself off as a courier, delivering packages to some posh Buckhead office for Ms. Solomon’s marketing agency.

When she and her colleagues were burned out at work, he picked them up in his run-down car, drove them to a lake and taught them to fish.

And whenever she thought of abandoning her business, he encouraged her to persevere. That’s one of the reasons she saw him nearly every day for more than 20 years.

“I would go to Rufus’ apartment and sit with him and eat some ice cream and do a puzzle,” she said. “And suddenly my life would make more sense, because that — not some corporate brochure I was working on — was real.”

Survivors include his sisters, Theresa K. Jones of Booneville, Ark., and Jerry Inscho of Birmingham; and his brother, Richard Stansell of El Cajon, Calif.