Stephen William Keller, an English teacher and a witness for the power of bone-marrow transplantation, died October 25 in Thessaloniki, Greece, of complications from meningitis. He was 32.

Keller was the youngest child of George and Alice Keller. Both served as civilian employees of the U.S. Army at Aberdeen Proving Ground. Stephen was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and grew up in Aberdeen.

Keller was a talented and popular student in the Aberdeen public schools. At Aberdeen Middle School, he was a member of a state-champion team in the Olympics of the Mind competition. At Aberdeen High School, from which he graduated in 1989, he was an honor-roll student and a member of the National Honor Society and Student Government Association, as well as the marching band.

He was a central figure in numerous other clubs and organizations and in the social life of his community. In 1987, his aging 1970 Dodge Coronet put in an unscheduled appearance in the town's Christmas Street Parade, sporting a miniature Christmas tree on the hood and signs claiming it was the entry of the Aberdeen Art Club.

Keller was a passionate sports fan, particularly of the Baltimore Orioles. In his teens, he was a devotee of Three-Buck Night at Memorial Stadium, often driving groups of friends to Baltimore for games. He was at the ballpark to witness, among other events, the shortest game of Cal Ripken Jr.'s consecutive-games streak, in which the Aberdeen-raised Orioles star was ejected in the first inning for arguing balls and strikes.

Keller won varsity letters playing for Aberdeen High School's perennially hapless volleyball and lacrosse teams, and he captained the volleyball squad his junior and senior years. He also served as manager and scorekeeper for the school's county-champion boys' basketball team.

Throughout his teen years, Stephen remained an active member of the Youth Group at Oak Grove Baptist Church.

In 1987, Keller was diagnosed with chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), a disease that usually proves fatal in a few years if untreated. The illness can be cured with a bone-marrow transplant, a process that involves destroying the patient's existing marrow system and growing a new one, using implanted cells from a compatible donor. No matching source of marrow was found among his relatives. In 1987, the odds of finding a match in the then-small U.S. registry were one in twenty, and indeed, no match was found. The British marrow registry was searched, but several possible candidate matches reacted negatively with Stephen's blood. Finally, more than a year after the searching had begun, the tiny Canadian registry offered up a possible candidate. A donor, Dennis Cyphiot, was found in Western Canada. His tissue was a perfect match to Stephen's! So, after his high-school graduation, he underwent chemotherapy and a successful bone marrow transplant at Johns Hopkins Hospital. In 1989, the odds of a successful bone marrow transplant were 50/50. Stephen's transplant was the first bone marrow transplant for leukemia with an unrelated donor that was performed at John's Hopkins; as doctors passed his door, they were heard to murmur: "He's the one!" Thus Stephen beat overall odds of his surviving CML of one in forty!

After a year's recuperation, Keller enrolled at Davidson College, in Davidson, North Carolina. There he majored German Language Studies and joined the Phi Delta Theta fraternity. He also became co-founder of Project Life, a campus service organization that continues to hold blood drives to recruit potential marrow donors to the national registry. More than 3,000 people have joined the National Registry through this effort.

In 1992, Keller traveled to Wurzburg, Germany, to spend his junior year of college at Julius-Maximilians-Universitat. He roamed extensively through Europe, including driving a battered Volkswagen Bus from Amsterdam down to Gibraltar and across a ferry to Morocco. In his second semester in Wurzburg, he struck up a relationship with a fellow foreign scholar, a law student named Elena Chatziliadou from Xanthi, Greece.

After graduating from Davidson in 1994, Keller moved to Xanthi, a provincial capital city in eastern Greece, nestled at the foot of the Rothopi Mountains. There, he began teaching English at the European Center for Foreign Languages and continued to court Chatziliadou, now a lawyer. He became fluent in Greek, to go with his mastery of English and German, and discovered a fondness for foamy, iced instant coffee, the unofficial national beverage of his new country.

In 1998, he and Chatziliadou were married at Saint Sophia Greek Orthodox Church in Xanthi. A local newspaper noted the striking influx of American and British guests -- friends Keller had made from Aberdeen to Davidson to Wurzburg -- at the event. The couple settled into a new condominium, with Chatziliadou's law office downstairs, and Keller continued teaching his native language, in classes and at private tutoring sessions. In 2000, they had a son, George Keller.

Funeral services were held October 28, 2003, at Saint Sophia Greek Orthodox Church. Keller is survived by his wife, Elena Chatziliadou, and son, George Keller, of Xanthi, Greece. A second child, a daughter, is expected in March. He is also survived by his parents, George and Alice Keller of Asheville, North Carolina; his brother, Air Force Major David Keller of Burlington, Mass.; and his sister, Karen Keller Thomas of Bel Air, Maryland.

Memorial services will be held in the United States on Saturday, December 20, 2003, at Davidson College in North Carolina and on Sunday, December 28, 2003, at Oak Grove Baptist Church in Bel Air, Maryland, at 2:00 p.m.

Friends are invited to remember and celebrate Stephen's life in one of the following ways: a trust fund has been established to support his children's education; Davidson College is collecting donations for a scholarship in his name; or you may contact the local Red Cross to join the national registry of bone-marrow donors.

by Tom Scocca