Roger Dale Myrick died on Jan. 21 at Southampton Hospital of complications of a stroke. He was 71 and had been planning to go back to work as chef in March at Cappelletti, a restaurant on Noyac Road in Sag Harbor.

Mr. Myrick had started his career as chef at 1770 House after graduating from East Hampton High School in 1963. From there he went on to cook at various restaurants, most of them in Sag Harbor, including Sugar Plum and Spinnakers, the latter being his favorite place to work. According to his niece Jennifer Stevens, who lives down the road in East Hampton from her uncle’s house, he also played the New York Lottery . . . and often won. He also liked making trips to the Mohegan Sun in Uncasville, Conn.

He was born on May 25, 1945, in Emporia, Va., one of the eight children of John Edgar Myrick and the former Cherry Lue Powell. He moved to East Hampton as a 9-year-old with his family. In addition to his niece Ms. Stevens, Mr. Myrick is survived by three brothers, James L. Myrick of East Hampton, William Myrick of Baldwin, and Herbert Myrick of Baltimore, and a sister, Estelle Privott of Norfolk, Va. His brothers George Myrick of East Hampton, John Myrick and Robert Myrick of Freeport, and his sister Hilda Carter of Atlanta all died before him. He is also survived by many nieces, nephews, great-nieces, and great-nephews.

Ms. Stevens said that her uncle had also enjoyed teaching himself to paint and painted watercolor landscapes and gardens. He showed his work at Ashawagh Hall in Springs and sold quite a bit of it.

Mr. Myrick was cremated. His family received visitors on Friday at 2 p.m. at the Yardley and Pino Funeral Home in East Hampton, and held a service at 3, presided over by The Rev. Marvin Dozier of Unity Baptist Church in Mattituck. Mr. Myrick’s ashes were buried at Cedar Lawn Cemetery in East Hampton.

George Ward Jr., a former Sag Harbor police officer and 29-year Fire Department volunteer, died at his home in the village on Jan. 8 at the age of 75. Death was attributed to B-cell lymphoma.

Mr. Ward had an innate knack for things mechanical and, after graduating from Pierson High School, he began working for the garage business his father had started, Ward’s Garage, and also worked from 1970 to 1979 as a policeman. He later switched to a garage in Southampton.

He was born at Southampton Hospital on Feb. 24, 1941, one of two sons and four daughters of George Ward Sr. and the former Julia Buttonow of Sag Harbor. His brother, Donald, died before him.

On May 5, 1963, he married the former Carol Vernon; the couple had known each other from a young age. When their two children were grown, they moved to Daytona Beach, Fla. A few years after the 2006 death of his wife, Mr. Ward sold their Florida house and moved to Corbin, Ky., where his son, George William Ward, lives. After that he came home to Sag Harbor.

In addition to his son, Mr. Ward is survived by a daughter, Cindy Capalbo of Sag Harbor. He leaves four sisters, Eileen Iacono of East Hampton, Miriam Guildi of Southampton, Kathleen Spalding of West Islip, and Judith Lattanzio of North Sea; two grandchildren, 14 nieces and nephews, and 20 great-nieces and great-nephews.

Ms. Capalbo said her father collected beat-up old cars, classic or not, that he would restore meticulously and then sell. While living in Florida, he was a member of several car clubs.

Mr. Ward’s family treasured him, she said, as did his many friends and his comrades at the Sag Harbor Fire Department, who helped get him home from Kentucky when he was already ailing. “The last-moment memories that were carried with George in his passing live on in the hearts of his firemen brothers, who enjoyed his visits to the department and were by his final resting bed,” she wrote.

The family received visitors at the Yardley and Pino Funeral Home in Sag Harbor on Jan. 11 from 4 to 8 p.m., with a walkthrough by the Sag Harbor Fire Department Honor Guard. A funeral Mass was said on Jan. 12 by the Rev. Manuel Zuzarte at St. Andrew’s Catholic Church in Sag Harbor.

Memorial donations may be sent to the Fire Department or its Benevolent Association, at P.O. Box 209, Sag Harbor 11963, or to East End Hospice, P.O. Box 1048, Westhampton Beach 11978.

Robert D. Hildreth, who won a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star as a soldier in Germany during World War II, died at home on Tuesday morning. Although he had had other health problems, his death was caused by a cerebral blood clot. He was 94 years old.

Mr. Hildreth was born on Jan. 12, 1923, into one of Bridgehampton’s oldest families. His only sibling, a sister, died before him. He enlisted in the Army after graduating from Bridgehampton High School. Once back from the war, in 1945, he met and married the former Olive Marie Ranalli, who died in September. After living for a while in Bristol, Conn., and in Sea Cliff, where their daughter was born, the couple moved to East Hampton, where Mrs. Hildreth had grown up, in addition to Greenport and Sag Harbor. Mr. Hildreth went to work in customer service for the Long Island Lighting Company.

In addition to his daughter, Marlene Hildreth Ross of East Hampton, Mr. Hildreth is survived by two nephews and a niece. He was to be cremated and his ashes buried at Cedar Lawn Cemetery in East Hampton; plans had not been confirmed by press time.

Marie Grace Steidle of Springs, a homemaker and longtime volunteer for a number of worthy causes, died in her sleep at home on Jan. 15 at the age of 93.

Mrs. Steidle was described by her family as energetic and sociable. She dedicated herself to community service, volunteering with the American Red Cross, Meals on Wheels, and the Southampton Hospital Thrift Shop, among others. A lifelong pursuit of learning led her to take classes in real estate, quilting, yoga, rug-braiding, oil painting, and cooking.

Her favorite place, according to relatives, was Maidstone Park beach in the quiet of early morning, and her fondest memories were of summers spent with her husband, Wallace E. Steidle, and children on a boat they kept at Captain’s Marina on East Lake Drive in Montauk, starting in the 1950s.

She was born at home on Dec. 8, 1923, in the Flatlands section of Brooklyn, to Bernard Clancy, a Brooklyn borough administrator, and the former Mary Jane Whelan. She graduated from St. Brendan’s High School in 1941, where she was a top student and a member of a dance group that performed at Carnegie Hall. After graduating, she worked as an administrative assistant to the president of Armour Corporation, an aircraft parts manufacturer.

She met her future husband at a neighborhood party in Brooklyn. He left his job as a machinist working in his father’s company to enlist in the Navy early in World War II, and was assigned to a California-based flight crew for a Consolidated PBY Catalina, an amphibious aircraft. They were married in New York two years later and moved together to his base in California.

At the end of the war the Steidles headed first for Brooklyn, then built a house in Huntington. They moved from there to Springs to be closer to water, buying a parcel of land from George Sid Miller, the family said. Mr. Steidle died in 1997; they had been married for 53 years.

Mrs. Steidle is survived by two sons, Rear Adm. Craig Steidle of Kittery Point, Me., and Wallace C. Steidle of Water Mill, and a daughter, Jody Jane Heneveld of East Hampton. Two other children, Kim Bernard Steidle and Jill Marie Steidle, died before her. She leaves 13 grandchildren and 6 great-grandchildren.

A prayer service was held at the Yardley and Pino Funeral Home in East Hampton on Sunday. She was cremated, and her ashes were buried the following day at Calverton National Cemetery, alongside her husband’s.

Polly Kraft, an artist and longtime Wainscott summer resident, died on Jan. 1 at home in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., of pancreatic cancer. She was 89.

Mrs. Kraft was a prolific painter of still lifes. The images were not static, but filled with the busyness of life — a rumpled bed with a shawl among the sheets and scattered mail, a bowl of browning apple quarters replete with seeds. A 1981 quote from the art critic John Russell cited in her Washington Post obituary describes her work as the “poetry of dishevelment.”

“She specialized in the domestic pile-up — cushions knocked out of shape, books and magazines left askew, hasty departures acted out in verismo style,” Mr. Russell wrote in The New York Times.

Her artwork, in both watercolor and oil, was featured in prestigious galleries in Washington and New York, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Addison/ Ripley Fine Art, and the Fischbach Art Gallery. Locally, Mrs. Kraft’s work was hung in many East End houses, and for years it was exhibited at the Elaine Benson Gallery in Bridgehampton. The late gallery owner was a close friend. “I remember a wonderful series of watercolors Polly painted of bumble bees,” Ms. Benson’s daughter, Kimberly Goff, said.

Mrs. Kraft’s art also was seen at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller on Newtown Lane in East Hampton. One exhibition there was of portraits of her friends, among them the author Peter Matthiessen, the film and stage director Gene Saks, and the film director Sidney Lumet with his wife, Mary (Piedy) Lumet.

At the house she owned in Wainscott’s Georgica Association for decades, she relished entertaining on her small screened-in porch overlooking the pond, though there was rarely room for everyone to sit down, particularly at New Year’s Day lunches. Friends said her sharp wit and lively personality also made her a sought-after guest. “Polly just lit up the room,” Ms. Lumet said.

She also had a large circle of friends in Washington, D.C,  where for decades she was one of Georgetown’s power doyennes, especially during her 26-year marriage to the widely syndicated news columnist Joe Kraft, and after his death in 1986, through her marriage to Lloyd Cutler, a high-profile Washington, D.C.,  lawyer, who died in 2005.

 For years she and Ms. Lumet had talked about how they wanted their deaths to be quick and painless when the time came. And so it was that after Mrs. Kraft’s cancer diagnosis, she called her friend with excitement: “Good news! I’ve got pancreatic cancer! There will be no pain. I’ll just go to sleep.”

Mrs. Kraft was determined to live until Hillary Clinton was elected president and to die before Donald Trump was inaugurated. The latter wish was realized at her death, with her children from her first marriage, to Whitney Stevens — David Stevens of Denver and Mark Stevens of New York City and Brook­haven — at her side.

She was born on July 15, 1927, in Spokane, Wash., to John Winton and the former Janette Main. A memorial service will be held at Christ Church in Georgetown at 11:30 a.m. on Saturday.

David P. Krusa, a former commercial fisherman who had put as much energy into developing an offshore tilefish harvest as he did writing poetry and fiction, died of congestive heart failure on Jan. 4 at home in Montauk. He was 75.

Before Mr. Krusa began targeting deepwater tilefish in the 1970s, the now-valuable fish was landed mostly as bycatch and largely in Barnegat, N.J. This shifted to Montauk after Mr. Krusa’s longline approach revolutionized the fishery. The coastwide harvest jumped from 125 metric tons to more than 3,900 metric tons by 1980, according to the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Mass.

Mr. Krusa’s innovations drew on his time longlining for halibut in Alaska around 1971, his wife, Stephanie, said.

He was born far from the ocean, in St. Louis, on Sept. 30, 1941, to Paul Henry Krusa and the former Mary Francis Cranston. His father died in a plane crash in 1945. In 1948, he and his brother and mother moved to Greenlawn on Long Island to be close to his father’s family.

As a boy, Mr. Krusa would bicycle to the Northport, Huntington, and Centerport harbors to play. At 15, he started clamming for money, often aboard a cast-off skiff that he and his brother, Chris, had been given by a yacht club to restore. For 10 years, the Krusa boys had a go at various inshore fisheries.

During the early 1960s he attended the Colorado School of Mines, studying engineering. He also went to the University of Washington, where he learned about fisheries and marine biology, and Columbia University to study writing.

During breaks from his studies, he crewed aboard a converted World War II minesweeper along with John Nolan, who would be a longtime fishing partner, chasing swordfish without much success. In 1965 he found work aboard shrimp boats off the coast of French Guiana. Subsequent travels took him all over North, South, and Central America, as well as Europe and Africa, where he learned about the people who worked the water and how they did it.

He married the former Stephanie King in 1967 and shortly afterward they drove to Alaska by way of Colorado and British Columbia. In Petersburg, Alaska, Mr. Krusa found work aboard the Betty, a 100-year-old wood halibut boat. He also learned how to catch salmon from an open skiff and tried logging until an injury forced him to leave that occupation and Alaska and return to clamming in Long Island waters.

Mr. Krusa and Mr. Nolan reconnected while working on Great South Bay, bought a shrimper from an owner in the Carolinas, and converted it for lobstering. This was the start of a 40-year partnership that expanded to crabbing, swordfishing, and tilefishing. As partners, they first commissioned twin 54-foot-long fiberglass Bruno and Stillman boats, the Deliverance and the Rainbow Chaser. As the fishery grew, they ordered two 83-foot-long steel vessels, the Restless and the Sea Capture, from Washburn and Doughty of Maine.

In the 1980s, Mr. Krusa obtained a marine surveyor’s license and established a global fisheries-development firm. He retired from most commercial fishing in the 1990s after being diagnosed with lymphoma.

In 1995, he traveled with his sons, Kipp and Lee, to assess possibilities in Mauritania and Gambia. In 1995 he also conducted an extensive study of resources on Guanahani, and other islands off the coast of Honduras, in the Caribbean.

In 2003, Mr. Krusa bought and restored a 48-foot-long John Atkins steel schooner, which he renamed Deliverance, for a trip in 2005 that reached the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Throughout his life and particularly after his illness forced his retirement, Mr. Krusa wrote stories, often about moral conflicts facing fishermen at sea. He was a founder of the Montauk Writers Group. His short stories were printed in The East Hampton Star, and his piece “Winter Trip” was included in “On Montauk,” an anthology published by the writers group.

He was also an occasional commentator on The Star’s letters pages. In 2004, he weighed in on the intersection of politics and fishing, observing, “If you don’t flip-flop your theories in the process of finding fish, the chances are — unless you are lucky — you’ll come in with an empty hold. I would rather have a competitor who is stuck in his ways than one who has the ability to change as new information is brought in.”

In recent years, he took up sculpture and woodworking, making gifts for friends and family and totems and paddles inspired by examples he had seen on the Northwest Coast. Ms. Krusa said one thing he will also be remembered for was his “outrageously frustrating” ability to win at gin rummy.

Mr. Krusa is survived by a brother, Christopher Krusa, who lives in Glen Carbon, Ill., two sons, Kipp Krusa of Nashville and Lee Krusa of Los Angeles, and a daughter, Margaret McKinnon of Willis, Tex. Three grandchildren, two nieces, two nephews, two grand-nieces, and two grand-nephews also survive. His mother died in 1994.

A celebration of Mr. Krusa’s life will be held at Sammy’s Restaurant on Flamingo Avenue in Montauk on Saturday from 2 to 5 p.m. His ashes will be spread at sea at a later date.

Memorial donations have been suggested to the East End Foundation, care of Roger Feit, P.O. Box 1746, Montauk 11954, or the Montauk Ambulance Company at 12 Flamingo Avenue, with the notation “David Krusa.”

Services for Matthew Lester of Springs, a 17-year-old East Hampton High School student who died on Monday, will begin Friday, with visiting hours at Yardley and Pino Funeral Home in East Hampton from 2 to 4 and 7 to 9 p.m. Funeral services will take place Saturday at 11 a.m., at the East Hampton Presbyterian Church, followed by a gathering at the Springs Firehouse.

Family Service League counselors will be on hand at the wake and funeral. A full obituary will appear in a future edition.

M. Grace Steidle of East Hampton died on Sunday at the age of 93. A prayer service will be held at the Yardley and Pino Funeral Home in East Hampton at 2 p.m. on Sunday. An obituary will appear in a future issue.

Joseph Vincent DiBlasi, who spent all his summers in Montauk, died at his Northport home on Sunday. He was 67 and had had cancer for two years.

Mr. DiBlasi earned a Juris Doctor degree at St. John’s Law School in Queens. As a lawyer, he first was chief of homicide for the Queens district attorney. He later had a private practice in Kew Gardens. A former law partner, Barry Schwartz, a Queens County Supreme Court justice, called him a terrific lawyer. “He was my best friend and a better family man, and a better friend.”

He was born in Brooklyn on Dec. 15, 1949, one of three sons of Rudolph DiBlasi, a former New York State assemblyman and Family Court judge, and the former Theresa Restivo. He grew up there, graduating from Brooklyn Preparatory High School and then from Fairfield University in Connecticut.

In 1973 he married the former Nancy Fisher of Cincinnati, who survives, as do three children. They had met as young adults at the beach in Montauk when she was a personal assistant to Nick Monte of Gurney’s Inn. Mr. DiBlasi had worked before graduating from law school as a caddy at the Montauk Golf Club with his lifelong friends Artie LiPani and Bill Wilkinson. They lived in the same Montauk area and played nightly whiffle ball, joined by Mr. DiBlasi. The house where he spent his summers had been built by his maternal grandparents after his grandmother’s brother was killed in World War II.

Wendy Duryea, a close friend, said Mr. DiBlasi was the kind of person who valued his friendships deeply and maintained close ties with friends from the different phases of his life. He was an enthusiastic golfer and fisherman.

In addition to his wife and children, who are Matthew DiBlasi of Northport, Christopher DiBlasi of Perth, Australia, and Jennifer DiBlasi of Huntington, Mr. DiBlasi is survived by two brothers, G. Vincent DiBlasi of Manhattan and Rudolph DiBlasi of Moriches, and two grandchildren in addition to a number of nieces and nephews. Donations in Mr. DiBlasi’s name have been suggested to the Independent Group Home Living Program (IGHL), 221 North Sunrise Service Road, Manorville 11949, which operates the home where Mr. DiBlasi’s brother Rudolph lives.

The family will welcome guests today and tomorrow from 2 to 4 and 7 to 9 p.m. at the Brueggemann Funeral Home, 522 Larkfield Road, East Northport. A funeral service will take place on Saturday at 11 a.m. at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in East Northport, with cremation to follow.

James Leonard Rea, who had a career with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, first as a surveyor and then, after several transfers and promotions, in the Soil Conservation Service, died on Dec. 29 at home in Ventura, Calif., of complications following a heart attack. He was 85.

Mr. Rea was awarded a Purple Heart for his service as a corporal in the Army during the Korean War from 1952 to 1954, though he did not speak of his time in the military, one of his daughters said.

In 1955, he married Elizabeth Bradley of Brooklyn, whom he met on Long Island. They had four children, three of them in East Hampton, where Mr. Rea was born to Frank Rea and the former Helen Mott on Jan. 19, 1931, and grew up, attending the Springs School and East Hampton High School, and one in Connecticut, after the family had moved to Willington, which is where he began his career with the federal government.

Old cars were a hobby, and, while living in Connecticut, he rebuilt a 1929 Model A Ford. At one point in his career, Mr. Rea took a two-year leave to buy and run a general store in Vermont, the Bomoseen Harbor General Store, something he had always wanted to do, according to his family.

Mr. Rea is survived by his children, Helen Wassmer and Holle Myers of East Hampton, Michael Rea of Mastic Beach, and Timothy Rea of Ventura, and by his companion, Joan Reed of Ventura. Two sisters, Eleanor Heise and Carol Lambert, both of Port Charlotte, Fla., also survive.

His wife died in 2013, and his brothers, Walter Rea, Kenneth Rea, and Herbert Rea, all of East Hampton, also died before him.

“He was a great family man and loving father,” his family wrote, “and will be deeply missed by his friends and family.”

After retiring with his wife to California, Mr. Rea became a member of the Ventura Veterans of Foreign Wars. He had also been a member of the East Hampton Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion, and enjoyed seeing friends and family members there.

Mr. Rea was cremated and requested that no service be held. Donations in his name have been suggested to American Legion Post 419, P.O. Box 1343, East Hampton 11937.