When Ira Stepanian was named Bank of Boston’s chief executive officer in February 1987, he turned out to be the right manager for what would soon be a tumultuous time.

Less than eight months later, the Black Monday stock market crash roiled the financial world. He then shepherded one of Boston’s most venerable banks to record earnings, after first digging out from lingering real estate loans and weathering New England’s deep recession in the late 1980s.

Mr. Stepanian, who was 80 when he died in a Naples, Fla., hospital last Monday after suffering a stroke in his Bonita Springs, Fla., home, wasn’t a typical Boston banker when he was picked to lead an institution that traced its beginnings to just after the American Revolution.

The son of Armenian immigrants, and the first in his family to graduate from college, he was neither a Boston Brahmin nor a Harvard man at a time when the banking community seemed to welcome nothing but. Indeed, Bank of Boston had turned him down twice before hiring him as a management trainee 24 years earlier, and his feet brushed every rung as he ascended to the top.

Though competitive — he had played basketball for Somerville High School and Tufts University — he was also concise. Mr. Stepanian kept his résumé at a succinct 203 words and was just as low-key about a career that others in Greater Boston’s Armenian immigrant community celebrated.

“I did not come in here looking to be president of the bank, so I don’t think I was cognizant of any possible barriers,’’ he told the Globe in 1987 when he was named CEO at age 50. “My background was not an issue.’’

Yet that background influenced him, and ultimately Boston, in significant ways. “The bank has been regarded as a staid, solid large bank, which it is,’’ he said in that interview. “Unfortunately it has not enjoyed the reputation of being human, which it is also. I’d like to make the community aware of that.’’

Mr. Stepanian pushed for investment in urban neighborhoods, efforts that brought him the Medal of Honor from the Organization for a New Equality, a civil rights organization. At the October 1995 ceremony, he spoke of his childhood in a working-class Somerville neighborhood, growing up in a house where his family left the back door unlocked so neighborhood friends could grab a basketball from the hallway for games at nearby courts. “As I look back, I can say I’m extremely proud of all I did and tried to do while at the Bank of Boston,’’ he said to a long standing ovation on a night that was poignant for reasons beyond the award and touching speech.

Among those in the audience were board members who had voted to push him out of the bank’s leadership fewer than three months earlier. Thirty-two years into his storied career, the bank’s board grew impatient in the face of stalled merger attempts during an era of consolidation.

In years past, he had been a loan officer and head of the bank’s London operations, chief of commercial lending and vice chairman of the bank and its holding company. He was named president and chief operating officer in 1982, then CEO in 1987, then chairman in 1989.

On the July 1995 day that the board sought his resignation as chairman and chief executive, Bank of Boston’s stock closed at 41 5/8. Some three years earlier, it had fallen to $3 a share before Mr. Stepanian pulled off what many in the financial community considered something of a miracle in restoring the institution to hearty financial health. “After 32 years at Bank of Boston, I feel it is time to move on and let others help direct this fine institution,’’ he said in statement. When he and the board finished discussions, he was said to have gently closed the door behind him as he left.

Born in 1936, he was the son of Sarkis Stepanian, who ran a cigar and sundries shop in Boston, and the former Armenouhie Kupelian.

“His high school pet peeve was unfriendly people, and he lived like that. He took pride in the fact that he attempted in every way possible to not be an unfriendly person,’’ said his son Philip of Arlington. “He was a man who lived by ‘do unto others as you would want done unto you.’ He was pretty empathic about that and was able to put himself into other people’s shoes before making decisions.’’

While playing basketball at Somerville High, he began dating Jacquelynne McLucas, who was all of a day younger. “They were high school sweethearts,’’ Philip said. The couple attended Tufts together — she at the university’s Jackson College — and married in 1961.

After receiving a master’s of business administration from Boston College, Mr. Stepanian was hired in 1963 at what was then First National Bank of Boston — renamed Bank of Boston in the early 1980s. Through various jobs, he retained a strong sense of the institution’s history, including after he became chairman emeritus.

In a 1998 op-ed for the Globe, a year before Fleet Financial Group acquired what by then was BankBoston, Mr. Stepanian argued that the institution should proceed cautiously in the mergers era. “The oldest bank in the nation, with a proud, storied heritage, headquartered and committed to Boston, is a key financial component for the health and growth of our region,’’ he wrote, adding: “Boston should retain its only home-grown, home-based, world-class bank, a bank that places this region at the top of its priorities.’’

That same year, he considered running for state treasurer before deciding to forgo politics. In the following years he at one point sued Fleet, airing grievances that dated to his ouster as chairman, but the sides settled their differences and Mr. Stepanian assumed a philanthropic role, serving on numerous boards, including as chairman for the Museum of Science. He also was an inspirational figure to those who knew him well.

“For the Armenian community in Boston to be able to point to Ira as literally at the pinnacle of business in Boston was huge,’’ said Peter Palandjian, chairman and CEO of Intercontinental Real Estate, a lifelong friend who considered Mr. Stepanian a key mentor and friend. “Ira was the man in Boston. He ran a bank that was as important as any institution on the planet. He meant a lot to our community.’’

In addition to his wife, and son, Mr. Stepanian leaves a daughter, Alisa of Watertown; another son, Steven of Amsterdam; and three grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. Wednesday in St. James Armenian Apostolic Church in Watertown.

As Mr. Stepanian and his wife, Jacquie, divided their time between Boston, Osterville, and Florida, “they were always on the go and always together,’’ Philip said.

“He absolutely adored my mother and they were always together,’’ Philip said. “They did everything together. He’d go to put gas in the car and she’d go with him. He would tell my mother how beautiful she was and share dozens of kisses with her every day.’’

To all who knew his parents, he added, “it was always Ira and Jacquie, and Jacquie and Ira. She was his one and only love.’’

Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.