George Frederick (Fred) Stork died on June 10 in Gaithersburg, Md. He was 95.

He had lived an active, happy, and healthy life until shortly before his death. He was a prolific writer, poet, musician, composer and photographer.

He was born in Philadelphia on May 18, 1913, son of poet Charles Wharton Stork and artist Lisl von Pausinger, daughter of Austrian court painter Franz von Pausinger.

He attended the Germantown Friends grammar school and the William Penn Charter (secondary) School, graduating at the top of his class in 1931. He was an outstanding scholar-athlete. In 1935, he received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, graduating magna cum laude. He was captain of the Harvard soccer team and was selected as an All-American player. He was also a champion tennis player, both at college and afterwards.

After graduation from college, he toured as a tennis player and taught English at private high schools in California and New Jersey. In 1942, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Force and served as a sergeant in the weather division. His unit was responsible for preparing the weather reports used by the P-47 Thunderbolt fighter-bomber squadrons to plan their attacks on the German forces in France and Germany. Ultimately he was involved in support of the D-Day invasion, landing on the ninth day, and was deployed with a mobile field unit in France and Belgium.

Returning at the end of the war, he married Mary-Ernestine Weber of Philadelphia on Oct. 27, 1945. They shared a love of music and enjoyed playing four-hand piano duets. Fred studied music at Columbia University, and attained a master’s degree in music from the University of Pennsylvania in 1949. In the early 1940s‚ Fred started serious solo piano composition, writing a suite for piano, inventions and preludes.

In the late 1940s, he taught music at the Granoff School of Music and the University of Pennsylvania School of Education in Philadelphia.

From the late 40s until the time of his death, he wrote hymns, marches, ballads, light songs and verse. He wrote a work of music upon the birth of each of his children, including a Lullaby for Lyrinda, a March for David, a Waltz for Susan and Cathy’s Round. He also wrote Mary’s Wedding March, which was played for his own wedding as well as those of some of his children.

Fred was an excellent piano improviser and played piano, guitar and banjo in several jazz bands and clubs over the years, including the New Sunshine Jazz Band, which performed and recorded in the Washington, D.C., area. Well past the age of 90, Fred continued to play piano and guitar and sing, performing at the Damascus, Md., senior center, and singing in the Damascus United Methodist Church choir.

Fred and Mary-Ernestine raised five children, first in Bryn Mawr, Pa., and then later, in Chevy Chase, Md., when the family moved there in 1963. Fred served as a technical editor for the Naval Research Lab in Washington, D.C., where he edited the History of the Naval Research Command and wrote Labstracts, the lab newsletter.

Fred enjoyed traveling. He joined some of his college classmates on a treasure hunting expedition to Mona Island off the coast of Puerto Rico (though no treasure was found.) In his youth he once stowed away on an ocean liner, was found out, and worked to pay for his passage. He traveled to Africa and India on service missions and educational tours, serving as photographer and chronicler for the journeys. He was a prolific photographer and loved to give slide lectures about his travels. His work was published in magazines, calendars, and journals, and many of his photographs were made into popular postcards, some of which are still available on the Vineyard. His last long trip at age 94 was to Alaska, during which he continued to take excellent photos.

In particular, Fred loved the family visits to the Stork family summer home in Chilmark. He first summered at the Vineyard in 1935, just after graduating from Harvard. The family rented different homes in Chilmark, always near Squibnocket Beach, in order to summer near family friends from Philadelphia. After the end of World War II, Fred’s parents bought land overlooking what is called the Eel Pond, at the eastern end of Squibnocket Pond, and built a home with a studio and dock at the edge of the pond.

Fred fell in love with Chilmark, with Squibnocket Pond, South Beach and with Menemsha. He loved to walk on the beach, surfcast for stripers off the rocks at Squibnocket and, more than anything else, to photograph. Fred returned to The Storks’ Nest almost every summer of his life.

He loved to walk along the beach in the early morning to see the varied colors and patterns of the rounded rocks and cobbles in the great glacial moraine of Stonewall Beach that had been carried down from Canada on the vast conveyor belt of the Laurentian Ice Sheet. He loved the patterns of the sea wrack, the whelks and the skate egg cases that tangled in a heap at the edge of the tide. He loved the swirl of the sea grasses at the edge of the sand and cliffs, the marsh mallows and cat tails at the edge of the pond and the huge snapping turtles that would toss and turn while they mated in the shallows off the dock.

And he loved to fish. He taught all of his children to fish and loved to go out on a boat to fish for stripers and blues out of Menemsha. He would stand patiently at the edge of the surf at Squibnocket waiting for a huge striper to snap onto his lure.

His daughter Lyrinda Snyderman writes: “I remember the first time he took us out onto the pond with the help of a (then) Gay Head native American guide who had a home on the Herring Creek connecting Menemsha and Squibnocket Ponds. The guide had stretched a net across the creek and caught a great pile of minnows. He took Fred and me out into the middle of Squibnocket, and for the rest of the day we dropped hand lines and hauled up perch after perch and sunfish after sunfish until they filled the boat near to overflowing.”

He also loved to kayak. In the 1950s, he would kayak in his brother’s Folboat, both in the pond and in the sea. One time he paddled the kayak out into the swells of the Atlantic off the south shore of Squibnocket Beach and found himself in the middle of a bluefish feeding frenzy. He gripped his handline with his toes, held the paddle in his hands, and ultimately pulled in 17 large and feisty bluefish which he stuffed into the bow and stern of the kayak.

He also surfed the waves at the beach in both the kayak and an aluminum canoe — long before surfing kayaks were ever invented. In his last summer, in 2007 at the age of 94, he still enjoyed photographing the wild swans on Squibnocket Pond while sitting in a kayak that his daughter Lyrinda paddled.

Ever since he was a teenager he loved to photograph. The Vineyard offered his favorite subjects for the rest of his life: sunrises, sunsets and the jetty, boats, and picturesque structures in Menemsha. He enjoyed meeting Alfred Eisenstadt, the famous photographer and summer resident, one time when they were both capturing a sunset over Menemsha. He wrote a poem about the encounter.

Fred was an avid naturalist. His love of wildlife, especially birds, led to his involvement with environmental causes and the Audubon Naturalist Society of the Mid Atlantic states, for whom he wrote articles illustrated with his photographs. He also bicycled daily throughout his 80s and 90s until his balance deteriorated.

He was active in the Washington, D.C., chapter of Rails to Trails which works to raise funds to convert abandoned railroad rights-of-way to biking and hiking trails. And he was a writer who contributed both poetry and numerous articles to the Gazette, as well as photography, wildlife and conservation publications.

In 1980, his beloved wife Mary-Ernestine came down with cancer. Fred retired to care for her in her last months. He was an active member of the Chevy Chase Presbyterian Church congregation and later the Damascus United Methodist Church in Gaithersburg, Md., and sang in their choirs.

In his final six years, he was cared for by his youngest daughter, Cathy Stork Waters, and her family in Gaithersburg, Md., while continuing his creative pursuits. As part of a 90th birthday celebration, a concert of his serious piano music was performed by the pianist Miles Graber at the Crowden School of Music, Berkeley, Calif.

Survivors include his children, Lyrinda Snyderman of Berkeley, Calif., Elisabeth Saya of Juneau, Alas., Diana Stork, also of Berkeley, David Stork, of Portola Valley, Calif., Cathy Waters, of Gaithersburg, Md, and eight grandchildren. He will be fondly remembered and dearly missed.

Please make any desired donations in his name to Rails-to-Trails.

Enchantment, Glowing and Growing

by G. Frederick Stork, 2007

For fifty years I’ve photographed

Menemsha with delight,

At dawn, at every time of day,

At sunset and at night.

I relish all its moods from silent

fog to hurricane;

I love its weathered buildings, like

Their owners, strong and plain.

I’ve photographed the jetty and

The anglers on the rocks,

The boatmen, artists, barefoot kids

Who hang around the docks;

And small craft by the score, from ancient

Scows to swanky yachts,

And sturdy, sea-stained swordfish boats

Have inspired many shots.

I thought I’d exhaust the subjects, but

This proved a groundless fear;

I moved in closer - on barnacles, nets

And picturesque fishing gear.

I kept discovering new delights

As Menemsha grew on me.

When you’re in love with a person or thing,

Isn’t this how it ought to be?