Stan Saunders, longtime WJZ sports anchor, was recognized long after he left the air

Stan Saunders was rarely starstruck.

He interviewed sports legends all the time — Michael Jordan, Cal Ripken Jr., Bo Jackson. While others fawned over the celebrities, Saunders shook their hands and started talking.

“It was something about his calmness and his demeanor, which made even a celebrity feel comfortable and at home, like he wasn’t trying to get anything out of them,” said his son, Karastan Saunders.

After all, Stan Saunders was something of a celebrity in his own right. The longtime WJZ reporter and weekend sports anchor was an affable, familiar face in Baltimore for more than two decades. As a kid, Karastan and his siblings knew that if Dad wasn’t home for “Jeopardy!” he’d be on the evening news.

Saunders retired from WJZ in 2013 but continued his journalism career as a college professor and grade school teacher, encouraging Baltimore students to pick up mics and tell their own stories. He’d been around long enough that people still recognized him in public long after he left the station.

Saunders, who also loved playing music and basketball, died Friday after a battle with long COVID that turned into sarcoidosis, his family said. He was 72.

“He was truly beloved in our newsroom,” WJZ said in a statement Sunday. “Stan had a way with words. More than that, he had a presence you could feel. When Stan was in the newsroom, you knew it; his energy, humor, and spirit made us all better.”

Saunders was born in Florida on Sept. 5, 1953, to Doreen and Stan Saunders Sr. Growing up in Miami, Saunders’ first love was music. He played the trombone, piano, baritone sax and drums. He went to what was then Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach, Florida, on a band scholarship, his son said.

He met his first wife, Beverly, in college. They had four children together: Sterling, Savoy, Karastan and Karenja. Saunders also became a father to Beverly’s older children from a previous relationship, Mechalle and Michael.

After Saunders graduated, the young family moved to North Carolina, where he studied sociology at North Carolina Central University and began his career in broadcasting, his son said. He then started working as a newscaster in Memphis, Tennessee, before ultimately moving to Baltimore.

“He did a number of stories that would uplift the community, bring awareness to certain social events,” Karastan Saunders said. “This was all before social media, so anything that was on the news was word.”

Former WJZ colleagues and admirers posted their favorite clips of Saunders on the job as news spread of his death on Monday.

“He was a pro sportscaster whose personality lit up the screen,” WJZ investigative reporter Mike Hellgren wrote in a social media tribute. “And he was a versatile broadcaster as well.”

Hellgren attached a video of Saunders interviewing BWI travelers whose flight plans to the Bahamas were interrupted by a 1994 snowstorm. One of the interviewees told Saunders he “will drink a lot of Bahama Mamas” on the rescheduled trip.

“You heard that,” Saunders said, raising his eyebrows and smirking at the camera. At an anchor’s request, Saunders then asked the traveler’s partner how she felt about him drinking all those cocktails.

“Oh, that’ll be fun, because I’ll be right Bahama Mama-ing with him,” she said.

“Ohh!” Saunders laughed. “It’s the Bahama twins!”

Saunders was good at his job because he always had something to say, Karastan Saunders said. He was curious and charismatic, and he didn’t speak to people with traditional TV news diction.

Saunders was “trying to always find a way to relate with someone because of his experience,” his son said.

Saunders was an adjunct professor at Towson University and a media studies professor at the Johns Hopkins University. He later worked as a substitute teacher at Loch Raven Technical Academy and Edmondson-Westside High School, according to WJZ.

He was also the founder of the nonprofit Baltimore Academy of Sports and Entertainment, which was incorporated into the Baltimore City Public Schools’ curriculum in 2020.

“He wanted his legacy to go on,” Karastan Saunders said. “He wanted to make sure he still instilled a lot of the TV skills, a lot of news reporting skills, into students who had an interest in it.”

Jim Mahjoubian, a former video production coordinator for City Schools, said he first met Saunders after the latter’s retirement from WJZ. Mahjoubian wrote in a social media tribute that Saunders “saw what I was trying to accomplish in Baltimore and he wanted IN!”

“He brought his impeccable on-camera skills, story wizardry, mentorship, friendship, and passion to help me inspire the students I was working with in Baltimore City Public Schools,” he wrote. “We produced TV shows ... where he trained our hosts in a way I could never dream of, took us to an Orioles game to go behind the scenes, put in hours inspiring our first cohorts of the city schools student media team.”

WJZ posted news of the former anchor’s death on its Facebook page late Sunday. Eighteen hours later, the post had nearly 5,000 likes, more than 600 shares and hundreds of comments from viewers sharing their memories and condolences.

“I used to love watching him,” one commenter wrote. “Stan was a good guy. He always made you feel like he was personally just talking to you.”

“Goodnight to a Baltimore legend,” another said.

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