Kelly MacBride-Gill’s friends always knew what was coming when she started to recount her father’s crazy antics — a classic “Stanton story.”

Here’s one of them: When MacBride-Gill was a kid, her entomologist father acquired a horde of Madagascar hissing cockroaches for a demonstration day at Brookside Gardens in Montgomery County.

Stanton Andrew Gill fixed up a tiny racetrack using a piece of wood and plexiglass dividers, then used Velcro to connect the large insects to toy cars branded with university logos. So marked the Cockroach Race.

Here’s another: Every year at the start of summer, Gill would host a party at his family farm in Carroll County. The parties obviously had to have a different theme each year — say, pirates, or wear a crazy T-shirt — and include a bunch of silly games. One was “golf cart jousting,” which involved attendees riding golf carts and attempting to pop water balloons with pointy poles, MacBride-Gill said.

It was at his beloved MacBride and Gill Falcon Ridge Farm that Gill died unexpectedly on Oct. 6. The cause of death is not yet known. He was 72.

Over his seven decades on Earth, Gill earned a reputation as a knowledgeable horticulturist; a talented grower of fruits, flowers and other plants; an esteemed entomologist; a passionate educator; and a fixture at the Olney Farmers Market. He was always on the move, joked that he never slept, appreciated a good pun and loved pulling pranks on friends and colleagues. He considered himself a “renaissance man.” He was a devoted husband to Nancy MacBride and father to two daughters, Chelsey and Kelly.

Gill was born on Aug. 10, 1952, to Austin and Rosalia Gill, and grew up in Silver Spring. Horticulture was in his blood: His great-grandparents operated an orchard in rural Pennsylvania, and his grandfather used that land to grow potatoes to make liquor, Gill said in a 2021 podcast interview.

Still, Gill said he didn’t think he was born with a green thumb. He’d gone to the University of Maryland in the early 1970s as a pre-med major and soon met Ray Bosmans, a horticulture student who told Gill about his plant studies. Gill took a class on fruit, and the rest is history.

Gill said he first fell in love with seedless grapes. He couldn’t grow them at his college apartment, so he convinced his parents to let him plant them at home, as long as he took the vines with him when he graduated.

Once, early in their friendship, Gill — ever the outdoor adventurist — asked Bosmans if he’d like to go canoeing in a nearby reservoir.

While Bosmans paddled, Gill sat behind him, absorbed in his studies and poring over books — so much so that he didn’t realize Bosmans had reached out to grab something and started to tip over the boat. The canoe capsized, and when Gill came up for air, his books were floating away.

Gill loved to learn and share the knowledge he gained. He earned a bachelor’s degree in horticulture with a minor in plant genetics in 1974, but he didn’t stop there. Gill developed an interest in insects while he studied horticulture, so he graduated with a master’s degree in entomology from the University of Maryland in 1980.

Gill met his wife, Nancy MacBride, during a graduate school summer at a lifeguard certification training, MacBride-Gill said. MacBride had come down from Iowa to work in an elementary school, and Gill asked her out. The couple married in 1977.

When Gill’s ideas were a little too out there, his wife reeled him in. They’ve always been a “really strong team,” MacBride-Gill said. (And when the couple moved into their first apartment together, their balcony was filled with grapevines.)

Gill worked for nearly 50 years with the University of Maryland and its extension, which performs educational outreach. He advised commercial nurseries and greenhouses on pest and plant problems. Gill was also key to the development of the two-year landscape technology program at Montgomery College, where he taught hundreds of students, his family said.

Gill’s loved ones remember him as thoughtful and kind, always the first to call a new faculty member and welcome them to the department. He would organize retirement parties and other gatherings to bring people together.

If he had to pick one word to describe Gill, it would be “giant,” said Jon Traunfeld, another friend and UMD colleague.

“He was a giant for [the UMD] Extension … not just bringing the expertise, these programs and these new ideas and the research, but just the way he supported other people within our organization, mentored other faculty, created these teams and just injected a lot of optimism, enthusiasm,” Traunfeld said.

He was always multitasking and never ignored a call from a grower who depended on him, said David Clement, Gill’s friend and colleague at UMD.

Outside of work, Gill was dedicated to his family, and he was quite the builder. He constructed his own one-acre home in Brookeville, where he grew fruit, and decided in 2000 that it was time to expand the operation. That year, he and his wife purchased the land that would become the MacBride and Gill Falcon Ridge Farm in Westminster.

There, Gill grew a little bit of everything, and he brought the produce to farmers markets around Maryland. He was especially well-known at the Olney Farmers Market, where regulars would swing by and affectionately refer to Gill as “the persimmon man,” “the apple man,” or, really, “the whatever-fruit-was-in-season man.”

The farm itself was full of character, featuring little sculptures of dinosaurs, insects and other creatures that Gill made out of plywood, metal and glass, his daughter said.

MacBride-Gill said she often thinks of her father’s most common advice: “Your real riches are in your friends. It didn’t matter what else you had as long as you had good people around you.”

Bosmans, his college friend, was once isolated in the hospital because doctors feared he had a serious disease. Bosmans wasn’t allowed visitors except for family, so his wife was the only person in or out of his hospital room — until Gill walked in.

“How’d you get in here?” Bosmans asked his friend.

“I told them I was your brother,” Gill replied. He wasn’t entirely lying.

Gill’s loved ones are working to establish a scholarship at Montgomery College in his honor. They will gather to remember him on Wednesday, Oct. 16, at the Central Maryland Research and Education Center, located at 4240 Folly Quarter Road in Ellicott City.

His family will welcome guests from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. If there had been only one window, Bosmans said, the room wouldn’t have been able to fit all of the people whose lives Gill had touched.