Stan Fish’s love affair with UNH and New Hampshire began decades before he joined the university as assistant director of admissions. As a boy, his parents would bring him and his sister from their home in Hartford, Connecticut, to their grandmother’s cottage at Rye Beach in the summer. Leaving the city for the then very rural New Hampshire Seacoast, he delighted in the ocean and the beach — and frequent trips to Durham for ice cream at the UNH Dairy Bar. Stan’s childhood summers also included time on Lake Winnipesaukee, where his father served as director of a boys’ camp and where Stan developed an enduring love of the outdoors that he later shared with his son, Curt, and his daughter, Sandra Curtis Fish.
Yet another early passion that later came to bear was Stan’s love of cars, particularly convertibles. “He was already an avid car guy by the age of two,” recalls his wife of 34 years, Virginia (Ginni) McCullough Fish ’88G. “Everyone who knew him knew that fact about him.” So much so, in fact, that when Stan retired from UNH in 1994, included among many other gifts was a set of keys to a red Mazda Miata convertible, rented by his col- leagues for a weekend’s use.
The son of two educators, Stan grew up understanding the importance of hard work and helping others. He earned money working on farms in suburban Hartford and on a paper route for “The Hartford Times” that ultimately led him back to New Hampshire, after he was nominated for a Times scholarship to Phillips Exeter Academy. He earned his undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College in Maine and, after being turned away from the Marines because of concussions he’d sustained as an athlete at Phillips Exeter, taught and coached sports at Maine’s Kents Hill School. In 1962, he married his first wife, Sharon Kravitz, with whom he raised Curt and Sandra, and soon began graduate studies in history at UNH. By 1968, he had earned his master’s degree, completed 30 hours of coursework in counseling and become the first certified elementary school counselor in New Hampshire.
To his delight, Stan’s connection with UNH became permanent when he was hired as an assistant director of admissions the same year. He became director of admissions in 1981 and dean of admissions in 1987. Serving as dean of admissions and financial aid from 1991 until his retirement, he achieved his goal of strengthening the financial aid program with grants and scholarships that made a university education affordable for more students.
“I had the great good fortune of having a role model and mentor like Stan Fish,” says former director of admissions David Kraus ’73, ’80G, who was hired by Stan. Now director of admissions at Davidson College in North Carolina, David remembers Stan as “a true visionary who could always look down the road and anticipate change.” In the 1980s, when he expanded the admissions staff, championed the university honors program and developed deans’ scholarships that encouraged bright students to apply to UNH, “Stan really got out ahead of many other public universities,” says David.
Stan and Ginni met in UNH’s publications office, where she worked while attending graduate school in the early 1980s. They bonded over their mutual interest in Colonial and Early American history and architecture, literature, poetry, boating and the ocean. Stan’s ties to the university and the affection he felt for it were well established by the time they met, says Ginni, adding, “I fell in love with UNH quickly, so we shared that as well.”
After he retired, Stan spent time assisting his aging parents. “He was very close to them and cared for them until they died,” says Curt. He also found a new career as a furniture finisher for a store in Freeport, Maine. For more than seven years he immersed himself in his newfound skill, which he honed so perfectly that customers continued to request his services long after he left in 2003 due to advancing Parkinson’s disease. Complications of Parkinson’s took his life on September 8, 2018.
