Vint Lawrence, an artist, gardener and activist in town affairs, whose connection to Norfolk began in childhood as the son of weekenders and developed in his last two decades when he took up full-time residence, died on April 9 at Smilow Cancer Hospital in New Haven at the age of 76. The cause was complications from acute myeloid leukemia.

A familiar figure at town meetings, which he attended in a Turkic cap and carrying a square basket, Lawrence joined the Planning and Zoning Commission in the early 2000’s. Once there, he instigated an extensive overhaul of the zoning regulations, the product of a laxer and more innocent age, by traveling to a dozen neighboring towns to collect alternate versions, which he cut and pasted into a spiral notebook that is still preserved in Town Hall as a founding document of the present zoning regulations.

“That’s what we loved about him,” says P & Z chairman Michele Sloane. “He didn’t come here and say, ‘OK, this is what you need to do.’ He’d have an idea, and then go out and do the spadework himself.”

James Vinton Lawrence was born on June 25, 1939 to James Freeman and Barbara Childs Lawrence of New York City and Norfolk. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy, graduated from Princeton in 1960, making his mark as a brawny cross-dresser in Triangle Club productions, then joined the CIA, serving in Laos from 1962 to 1966 as paymaster to a Hmong tribal army in the United States’s covert war on the North Vietnamese border.

Returning to Washington, D. C. in 1966, Lawrence met and married Maria Satzger, quit the CIA to follow his vocation as an artist—a period of his life he later described as, “You put your head down and you go through the wall”—and raised two children. He sold his first caricature, of Philip Roth, to The Washington Post in 1969 for $15, becoming a regular contributor there and at Foreign Policy, Washington Book World and Washington Monthly, among other publications. During the Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations, Lawrence provided the distinctive illustrations for The New Republic, where he was a contributing editor.

After a divorce and his marriage, in 1986, to Anne Garrels, then a foreign correspondent with ABC News and later with National Public Radio, Lawrence began to spend more time in Norfolk, but also joined Garrels in Russia when she became NPR’s Moscow bureau chief in 1993.

“I had said to him when we married that if by any stretch I could go back for another assignment to Moscow,” says Garrels, who was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1982, “it would mean the world to me, and I would like him to be there for a chunk of it. He’d come every three months for six weeks. He started painting again in Moscow. The kids would join us for a vacation. In many ways it was our happiest time.”

When Garrels’s stint in Moscow ended in 1998, the two sold their home in Washington, D.C., and moved full-time to Norfolk. Lawrence was still producing drawings for The New Republic and worked a hectic schedule from Thursday, when he received his assignments, until noon on Monday, when the inked drawings were picked up by FedEx for delivery to Washington.

Writing about Lawrence’s work for The New Republic, editor Tim Noah praised his “wry sensibility” and “his talent for intricacy.”

In the early 2000’s, Lawrence retired from editorial cartooning to focus on his painting, spending long hours in his studio; on his garden, which expanded to 16 raised beds growing a mix of flowers and produce, a dahlia border, a small field of potatoes, an asparagus patch, an allée of rhubarb and an enclosing hedge of raspberry vines that ripened from mid-summer to late fall; on his town activism; and, increasingly, on supporting Garrels as she took assignments to hotspots around the world.

During the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, which Garrels covered from inside Baghdad, Lawrence wrote and disseminated “The Brenda Bulletins”, an exuberant proto-blog, relaying news of his wife’s adventures to anxious friends and relations. “Annie may be bound by facts as a journalist,” said Lawrence, “but I am not.”

He was on the phone to Garrels when a cruise missile shot past the balcony of her hotel room, followed the course of the Tigris River and turned left to slam into Baghdad’s central post office.

“He said, ‘I’m terrified,’” Garrels relates, “but he never said ‘I can’t stand it, come home.’”

It was during those years that Lawrence became deeply involved in town affairs. He was one of the founding members of the Coalition for Sound Growth (CSG), an advocacy group formed in opposition to the golf course development on Bald Mountain. Subsequently, he pushed the coalition to be for something, to advocate proactively for sound growth, rather than to be reactive and against things.

His first undertaking was to rewrite the town plan, then coming due for its mandated 10-year update. As with the zoning regulations, he began by traveling to neighboring towns to collect samples of other town plans and talk to their authors.

“He must have gone to every town in northwest Connecticut,” says Pete Anderson, a fellow member of CSG. “He’d collected about 25 ‘Plans of Conservation and Development,’ as they’re called. A group of us would gather at his kitchen table and talk about the town, then take five or six POCD’s home with us to read.”

The group, now reduced to three members, was eventually drafted as a sub-committee of the P & Z Commission and began writing the town plan. It advised bringing in a consultant, who conducted a survey, led town-wide discussions about Norfolk’s good and bad aspects and guided the P & Z in drafting the final plan.

“Vint did a lot of the writing,” says Anderson. “But if our lives are a dialogue between heart and head, what Vint really put into all this was the heart. Various heads would come in to guide the project or tweak it. But the heart part, I don’t know how we’re going to replace that.”

Lawrence and his kitchen-table coalition conceived and raised money for a micro-loan program administered by the National Iron Bank; the Norfolk First Alert system; City Meadow Park; the annual monitoring of Tobey Pond’s waters. It contributed funds to the Foundation for Norfolk Living, subsidized the Historical Society’s walking map of Norfolk and the Miles of Smiles visitors map, worked to keep the Corner Store solvent and joined forces with the EDC to redesign the town’s website, a project Lawrence referred to as his “swan song” and which is due online in the next 30 days.

Visitors to Lawrence’s studio, a large and diverse group, were greeted by a hand-lettered sign above the door: “Take courage.”

Lawrence is survived by his wife, Anne Garrels, of Norfolk, Conn.; his daughters, Gabrielle Strand, of Indialantic, Fla., and Rebecca Lawrence, of Kalispell, Mont.; a granddaughter, a brother and two sisters.

A memorial service will be held at the Church of Christ Congregational, 12 Village Green, Norfolk, on Saturday, July 16, at noon, followed by a lunch at 71 Windrow Road. Donations may be made in Vint Lawrence’s name to: Great Mountain Forest, 200 Canaan Mountain Road, Falls Village, CT 06031.

Photo by Christopher Little.

Correction: An earlier version of this article credited Vint Lawrence, Pete Anderson and an unnamed third person with writing the Town Plan. In fact, the plan was substantially written by the town’s consultant, Glenn Chalder, and the P & Z Commission, with input from members of the community, among them Vint Lawrence.