“Be yourself,” is something no one ever had to tell Stephen Imes.

Imes, a lover of the outdoors, of family and friends, a skilled shooter who meant certain death to a bird on wing, a man who seemed to give away with as much enthusiasm as he gathered in, died Saturday at his home in Lowndes County, true to his authentic self to the end. He was 68.

“He just had a different way about him, the way he carried himself. He could fit in anywhere, with anybody,” said his friend Jim Buck Vaughan.

“He was a fantastically unique individual,” said Ben Baker, Imes’ closest friend for almost 20 years. “People gravitated to him because of his personality. He was also one of the kindest persons I’ve ever met in my 66 years.”

“I think that’s the thing I loved best about him,” said Dava Imes, his wife of 35 years. “He always said it was his mission to impact as many people as he could. It was just in his heart to do that. He would hear people say they were saving up for this or that or to have something at the end of the world, but Stephen never thought that way. The way he saw it, when he saw people in need he’d say, ‘This may be the end of their world,’ and he would help. That gave him so much pleasure.”

From his appearance to his passions, Imes was an unconventional man born into a conventional world. A member of a prominent Columbus family — his family has owned and published The Dispatch since 1922 — Imes spent years working in the family business under his father, Birney Imes Jr., first as a pressman and ultimately as general manager.

He seemed as content working in the bowels of The Dispatch as a pressman as managing the newspaper’s business affairs as GM.

In his early years at the paper, Imes was an avid triathlete and sported a beard — he said it kept him warm — much to the displeasure of his father, who had a well-defined and articulated sense of proper grooming that did not include facial hair.

When Imes left The Dispatch in 1993 to pursue other interests he grew a ponytail, not so much as a show of defiance but of self-expression. Although he kept a ponytail the rest of his life, as it was with so many other things, he found a way to use it as a form of generosity, too, cutting and donating the locks to Locks of Love, then growing it out again.

As he got older, the ponytail must have appeared incongruous. His son, Trey, noted that every time they traveled to the family condo on the Gulf Coast, he would notice people staring at his dad.

“I wondered, ‘What are they staring at?’” Trey said. “People were confusing him with Ted Nugent. You would see them get up their courage and come over and say, ‘You’re Ted Nugent, aren’t you?’ The more he said ‘no,’ the more convincing he was. I think he got a kick out of it.

“Dad always said he was an introvert, but I never believed that,” Trey continued. “He loved to meet people, and so if someone thought he was Ted Nugent, that was an opening to start a conversation. I remember one time, a guy came up and before he could say anything my dad put a finger to his lips and said, ‘Sshhhh!’”

A master of helice
Imes’ interests were varied and he pursued them feverishly with a childlike enthusiasm that could be contagious.

Nowhere was that more evident than in his pursuit of the sport of helice, an advanced form of trap-shooting where the targets are designed to dart off in unpredictable directions to mimic the flight of a bird. It’s a challenge for even the best marksmen.

“About four years ago, Stephen heard about helice and found out there was a small helice ring in Birmingham,” said area businessman and friend Jimmy Bryan. “So he dragged me over there and fell in love with it immediately. All the way back, he was talking about it, saying we had to build a helice ring at Prairie Wildlife. I wasn’t so sure about it, but I agreed to partner with him on it. But, really, it was all his doing from start to finish. It’s the best helice ring in the country and that’s because of Stephen. He sort of dragged me along, but now you can’t drag me away. That’s because of Stephen, too. He had a way of getting you excited about things.”

Imes proved to be a master at helice. Just two years after taking up the sport, he competed in the world helice championships in Rome.

Often, people who become experts in something tend to become self-absorbed, consumed in perfecting their craft.

But it wasn’t that way with Imes.

“It seemed like he had as much fun helping other people improve as he did with his own performance,” Dava said. “He was always encouraging people.”

His personality suited the role.

“He was always even-keel, never out of kilter,” Baker said. “He had a way of calming you down. ‘Everything is going to be alright,’ that sort of thing.”

A generous man
Just about every friend seemed to have stories about Imes’ generosity, whether it was charities such as Kids Across America or Veterans Closet or a host of other charities.

But his generosity was also spontaneous.

In 2001, Imes opened Waukaway Springs Water Company, later renovating a historic College Street building as the company’s headquarters. The water, which comes from natural springs on property Imes owns near Vossburg, has grown to seven distribution centers throughout the state, but — in typical Imes fashion — it also became another avenue through which Imes could extend his generosity.

“During Hurricane Katrina, Stephen found out that the hospital in Hattiesburg had a desperate need for water,” Dava recalled. “He said, ‘Let’s go’ and was sending water down there right away. He also found out that the people down in Vossburg were cut off. So he and Lee Norris made this huge pot of soup, put it in the back of the pick-up truck and headed down. The people there had nothing. (Imes and Norris) would show up and start giving out soup and crackers. It sounds like a little thing, but it meant the world to those people at the time. He loved doing things like that. No big to-do, just see a need and do what you could.”

Everything he touched, it seems to Dava, had some element of giving attached to it.

That includes their marriage.

“What he gave to me was self-confidence,” Dava said. “I wouldn’t say I was a shy person before we met, but I did kind of hang back a little and check it out. I wasn’t very assertive, I guess you could say.

“But he helped me realize I could do anything,” she added. “He would say, ‘You can do this. I know you can,’ just very supportive and encouraging. He was always saying, ‘One day, you’re going to need to know how to do this if something ever happens to me.’ Now, I can go anywhere and do anything. I’m not afraid. That’s what Stephen gave to me. I think he did that for a lot of people. That’s just who he was.”

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].