Bobby R. Stamper

Bobby Ralph Stamper was born on November 19, 1932 in McDowell County, West Virginia. (1) As a child, he moved to Grayson County, Virginia with his family. (2) He served in the U.S. Navy from 1951 through 1954, during the Korean War. (3) 

The exact year in which Stamper began working as a plumber at the White House is unclear, but he likely started there between 1951 and 1955. (4) As a plumber, Stamper helped maintain the plumbing and water features inside the Residence and on the White House Grounds including the fountains and sprinkler systems. He was occasionally frustrated with White House gardeners for breaking water features on the grounds, thus requiring him and the other plumbers to fix them. A newspaper article from November 1980 quoted Stamper: “All the sprinkler heads around the lawn are marked. Easy to see, you’d think. But every week or so it seems one of their guys [gardeners] gets careless and runs a piece of equipment over a sprinkler, which we then have to replace. Also they sometimes drive stakes into the ground and penetrate pipes, which, of course, we have to fix. Have to just drop everything and go do that.” The same article identifies Stamper as “chief of the plumbing unit” at the White House, so he had been promoted sometime prior to 1980. (5) Despite his occasional frustration with fixing sprinkler systems, he must have enjoyed his work for he stayed at the White House for several decades, retiring in 1987. (6)

After retiring, Stamper moved to Brogue, Pennsylvania, and then to New Port Richey, Florida, in 1995. According to his obituary, he was active in the Baptist Church and was “an ordained deacon and had preached in many churches.” (7) Stamper passed away on January 5, 2000, and was buried in Byars Cemetery in Whitetop, Grayson County, Virginia. (8)