Donald Read Shanor of Edgartown and Chappaquiddick died August 31 at his Edgartown home after a brief illness. He was 94 and was a longtime journalist who had been a foreign correspondent and taught at the Columbia School of Journalism.

Don and his late wife, Constance Collier Shanor, who died in 2018, had been year-round Pierce Lane residents since 1985 and seasonal residents for 12 years before that. Their home had once been an ice house on Sheriff’s Meadow Pond, owned by the late Vineyard Gazette editors and publishers Henry Beetle and Elizabeth Bowie Hough.

Delighted by the Vineyard, the Shanors built, with their own hands, a summer getaway on Chappaquiddick in 1975.

Don was born July 11, 1927 in Ann Arbor, Mich., a son of William and Katherine Read Shanor. He graduated from Comstock Park High School in Comstock Park, Mich. and, in 1951, the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. In 1965, he received a master’s degree from Columbia University.

He served in the U.S. Naval Reserve in the Pacific. He was a lifelong animal lover, devoted especially to Chesapeake Bay retrievers, and always had one by his side. He frequently recounted to his children — perhaps apocryphally — how he adopted a monkey on a Pacific island and taught it to use a typewriter.

At Medill, he met Connie Collier, who would be his wife for the next 66 years.

A few months after their graduation and marriage, the young couple took a freight boat from Boston to Liverpool. For the next 16 years, they lived abroad in London and then Wimbledon, where Don worked for United Press International.

He was a correspondent for the American Forces Network in Frankfurt and a foreign correspondent covering Eastern Europe for the Chicago Daily News. He received the Federal Republic of Germany Friendship Award in 2005.

In 1959, the Shanors returned to the U.S. and lived in Demarest, N.J. and then Manhattan, where Don joined the faculty at Columbia and headed the international division for foreign students. In 1984-85, the couple went abroad again when Don became a visiting professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. He was the author of five books, News from Abroad, Behind the Lines, The Soviet Triangle and Soviet Europe. With his wife, he co-authored China Today and After the Russians.

At the time of Connie’s death, the Shanors had just completed work on a book on Island lighthouses. At the time of his own death, Don was completing work on Connie’s book about Isabel Barrows, the country’s first female ophthalmologist.

When not at a typewriter or a computer or listening to classical music, Don could often be found with a hammer and nails, repairing one house or another. He built his own catboat. It never sailed but his granddaughter, Zoe Shanor, plans to get it into the water.

In younger years, he was an avid bicyclist. Even in his 80s, he was indefatigable, jogging and walking long distances on land bank properties. He invited Zoe for these as well as cross-

country skiing adventures and ice skating at Sheriff’s Meadow.

About a decade ago, Don and Connie felt that their granddaughter should travel abroad. They drove through France, Austria, Belgium, Germany and Hungary. Zoe remembers her grandfather as tireless, frequently at the wheel, and eager to introduce her to the countries where he and Connie had spent so much time.

He is survived by his sister, Alice Marsh of Grand Rapids, Mich.; two daughters, Rebecca Shanor of New York city and Lisa of Oak Bluffs; and granddaughter Zoe Shanor of Oak Bluffs. In addition to his wife, he was predeceased by his son, Donald Jr., brother Richard, and sister Katherine Baum.

A celebration of life will be private.

Contributions can be made to the Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation, P.O. Box 1088, Vineyard Haven, MA 02568.