Ronald “Ron” Allen Buss “made friends everywhere he went,” says his friend Sharon Poitra. With a heart of gold, a patient demeanor and a supreme sense of humor, Poitra says Buss was loved by everyone who knew him.
He lived on the streets of Eugene on-and-off for about eight years, before finding stable housing around 2020. He hung out in The Kiva Grocery’s parking and general downtown area, where he used to distribute his $1 publication, Our Streets of Eugene. It shed light on Eugene’s homeless community through the written word, with poems, stories and experiences.
On Christmas morning 2024, Buss passed away peacefully at Valley West Health Care Center.
Buss was born the youngest of four siblings on Dec. 17, 1958 to parents John and Anne Buss in Tacoma. He was close with his older siblings, and because they lived out in the country, Vicki Sullivan, his only sister, said they would often be found playing baseball, catching frogs in the creek or getting into mischief together.
As a teenager, Buss was a mechanically minded, music-loving rebel. He loved shop class and history most, but those were some of the only classes he ended up going to. “He would go to school, then he’d step out the back door pretty quickly,” says his Eugene housemate Sylvia Gregory. “He would sign the letter from the school saying he wasn’t there, and forge his parents’ signature saying he was excused. Then he’d get back before they got home from work.”
Ever since he was a child, Sullivan says, “He loved as deeply as anyone could ever love.”
He played many instruments, including guitar, bass and drums, so much so that when he was a teenager his parents gave him the attic so he could play as loud as he wanted. He loved classic rock, and his favorite bands were The Rolling Stones and Nirvana. He passed on this love to his many nieces, giving them each different albums for birthdays and Christmas, and teaching them how to play music. “I’m a huge music person myself, now, because of my uncle,” says his niece, Tonja
He was also a practical joker. When his nieces were little, “He’d tell us these scary stories, and then he would incorporate everything around him into the story at the perfect time,” Guizzetti-Clark. says. From having a flashlight flicker behind his back, to having his friend bang on the window at just the right moment, “He would just petrify us,” Guizzetti-Clark says. “My Uncle Ronny was just the coolest person ever. He was our favorite.”
When he was in his late teens, he moved to Modesto, California. He worked for many years at a moving company with his brother. After he left the company, other jobs he worked included being a PepsiCo driver, a candy distributor and working at a container manufacturer. “I never knew him not to have a good, solid job and a nice muscle car. He always had some type of fast car,” Guizzetti-Clark says. After that, he returned to the moving industry and was making “$100,000 a year” he told Eugene Weekly in 2014.
He married a woman named Diane in 1986 and together they had four kids. The couple divorced in 2008. After years of suffering many injuries through his various jobs, in 2011, Buss moved to Florence to be closer with his kids.
He ended up in Eugene living off of his disability check. Being faithful to his child support meant there wasn’t much money left over to pay rent, Gregory says. After a year of living off of his 401(k), he became unhoused, living on and off the street for about eight years. It was during this time that he met and got a job with David Gerber, who had a street paper focused on art and written pieces by Eugene’s homeless community called Oregon Vagabond Motivator.
Buss sold the paper from the Kiva parking lot until it stopped printing. In October 2013, he started up his own newspaper, Our Streets of Eugene, complete with a newsletter written by Buss himself. Our Streets of Eugene carried on OVM’s legacy. “He knew absolutely everything there was to know about what goes on downtown,” Gregory says. “He was so observant.”
“We all enjoyed talking to him because he’s an interesting guy, nice person, and easy to talk to,” says Gregory, speaking on behalf of the flock of ladies who frequented Kiva at the time and befriended him. Poitra, who knew him from distributing another local newspaper, confirms his popularity. “People tended to bring him things, and he would usually ask for milk instead of any kind of coffee or anything. On a really hot day, he would ask for a Coke.”
“It was very interesting to talk to when he wasn’t your run of the mill houseless person. He was an interesting stand up guy,” Gregory says. “He always dressed well, he was clean and didn’t do street drugs or anything like that. He didn’t drink, either. He just smoked. But that was it. If he had half a chance, he could have done anything he set his mind to.”
One cold January day in 2020, Gregory ran into him on the street, and he told her he had just gotten out of the hospital for the second time in three months. Aside from various injuries he acquired over his storied career in the moving and warehouse industries, he also suffered from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. “I thought to myself, ‘He’s gonna die out here, if he doesn’t get housing,’” Gregory says. “And so I remodeled and made my basement habitable.”
He lived with her until October 2024, when his COPD, injuries and wounds got the best of him, and he was placed on hospice before eventually being moved to Valley West. He passed away on Christmas morning, leaving behind many people who loved him deeply. “Despite the fact that he’d been through hell and gone in his life, he tried his very best,” Gregory says. “I’m just really proud that he was our friend,” Poitra says.
He is preceded in death by his parents, John and Anne Buss, and his oldest brother, Gary Buss. He is survived by his sister and brother, Vicki Sullivan and Doug Buss, as well as many nieces and also Jeremy. He is also survived by his four children, Michael, Tracy, Steven and Vincent.