Ruth E. Suter, a homemaker and an accomplished quilter, died Monday at Coastal Hospice in Salisbury of complications from a fall she suffered outside her Easton apartment building. She was 96.

The daughter of Harry W. Ziehm, a German immigrant who was a Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Co. manager, and Eloise C. Smith, a homemaker, Ruth Eloise Ziehm was born in Baltimore and raised in Forest Park.

After graduating in 1939 from Forest Park High School, she worked as a secretary and in retail before her marriage in 1946 to Gordon Webb Priest.

In 1951, she and her husband, who was general sales manager of Reliable Distributing Co., a wholesale wine and liquor firm, moved to Hagerstown. In 1964, they returned to Baltimore and settled at Elkridge Estates in North Roland Park.

After her husband’s death in 1968, she remained at Elkridge Estates, and in 1976 married Walter Hart Suter Jr., who had been two years ahead of her at Forest Park High School.

The couple moved to St. Michaels in 1985. Mr. Suter, who was an engineer with Westinghouse Electric Corp. and the Army Corps of Engineers, died in 2010.

Mrs. Suter was known for her “joie de vivre and sardonic wit,” said a son, Gordon Webb Priest Jr. of Baltimore. Until her fall, she was living independently and still driving her car to visit friends, going out for lunch and to church on Sundays.

She was a member of the Bayside Quilters of Easton and the Bay Hundred Bee of St. Michaels. She also hooked rugs and was known for her cross-stitching.

She was an avid reader of fiction and enjoyed keeping in touch with friends on Facebook and playing stimulating “mind games,” her son said, like Words with Friends.

Mrs. Suter was a member of the Women’s Club of St. Michaels and an active communicant of Christ Episcopal Church.

A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Monday at her church, 301 S. Talbot St., St. Michaels.

She is survived by two other sons, Jeffrey Todd Priest of Towson and Patrick Campbell Priest of Ocean Pines; two stepdaughters, Barbara Suter Russell of Fredericksburg, Va., and Johanne Suter Hutson of Ocean City; nine grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.

—?Frederick N. Rasmussen