Peter Ochs, a longtime Aquinnah homeowner, died peacefully at his home in Vienna, Austria on March 11. He was 91.

For many years, he was a writer for NBC Nightly News. Before that, he had been an Associated Press reporter in New York.

He was born in New York city on Nov. 27, 1931. a son of Stephen and Renee Ochs. Though his childhood years were spent largely in New York, he lived for a time in Nassau in the British West Indies and attended the Bishops College School in Lenoxville, Quebec. He was a 1952 graduate of Williams College, where he wrote for the literary magazine.

He discovered the Vineyard as a cyclist, and from time to time stayed at the youth hostel before buying a hilltop site above Moshup Trail in Aquinnah. In the 1960s he built a tall, much-beloved house there.

He was always interested in theatre and on a trip to Europe during a sabbatical from NBC, he joined a Viennese theater company performing at cabarets in Munich. With a show they called Vienna Blood, he traveled through Germany and finally to Vienna, There he met Gudrun Waltenstorfer, a Viennese. They married and Vienna became — after the Vineyard — his second home.

His Viennese friends, who quickly dubbed him Ludwig, felt he was made for the stage and he continued to perform regularly with the company that had brought him to Austria. Even though his German was not always perfect, he wrote one-man shows for himself. He also, in 1987, made a film about the World War II concentration camp in Mauthausen, Austria. In 2014, he wrote and produced a play called Winnie and Adi about the lives of Churchill and Hitler, using their own words to recall their childhoods and speeches during the war. There were performances of it in both Vienna and Munich. The grandson of Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s minister of foreign affairs, recently requested rights to continue its production.

Although he had sold his Aquinnah house in 2008 and made Vienna his winter home, he continued to come to Aquinnah in summer until 2014, renting various houses. Invariably, when he was on the Vineyard, he wrote commentary pieces for the Gazette. In one written in 2011, he recalled when the town was putting up road signs, he had one made for his road: “But the letters of my name took up too much room, so the sign came out Ox Way. But it never was put up because it wasn’t my driveway anymore, so now I carry it around with me wherever I go.”

With the onset of Covid, he had been confined to his Vienna apartment for the last two years, happily reading and continuing to write. One of his last poems was about Aquinnah.

He is survived by his wife Gudrun Waltenstorfer of Vienna; a sister, Claire Zoeller of Santa Fe, N.M.; and a half sister Helen O’Connor of Delmar, N.Y.