A quiet, gentle man with a powerful pen and strong opinions, Vic Runtz, the Bangor Daily News staff cartoonist for a quarter century, died Thursday of a heart attack at a Charlottetown nursing facility near his home at Brackley Beach, Prince Edward Island. He was 78.

Canadian by birth, a citizenship in which he took great pride and never relinquished, Runtz spent his childhood in Arnprior, Ontario, a suburb of Ottawa. Growing up in the shadow of the national capital and influenced by life near his country’s political crossroads, he discovered early his interest in cartooning.

He tasted the thrill of being close to breaking news during the Great Depression (yes, he would remind his Bangor co-workers, Canada experienced one, too), and the war years, when he enlisted in the Canadian navy. It was in the heartland places of his childhood and the coastal ports of his military service, cities like Halifax, Nova Scotia, that his love of politics and art was melded together.

Vic’s bearing was pure Canadian. An unpretentious man with a strong sense of God and country, he would love two countries, in different ways. He relished a good discussion but loathed confrontation. The only things in life that riled him were boorish politicians – usually those on the right, but occasionally those on the left, too – and people who treated others with disrespect.

As a cartoonist, Vic wielded a pen that could cut but was never cruel. He criticized those in public life without demeaning them as human beings. During the Carter years, while some cartoonists chose to mock the man, Runtz aimed at that president’s policies and used humor and his craft to expose the administration’s shortcomings. Later, when Ronald Reagan entered the White House, Vic Runtz trembled inwardly. But publicly, although his cartoons had bite, he showed the same restraint. He lampooned the policies, not the man.

During World War II, Vic, a young man in the Canadian navy and far from home, was stationed in Charlottetown, then more than now a quiet province of rolling green meadows and few tourists, even in summer. A Christian, Vic attended the downtown First Baptist Church and was struck immediately by a smiling young soprano in the choir. The two began dating and soon married. He and Aletha, or “Lee,” were companions until his death.

During the years of Vic’s employment at the NEWS, Lee would stay with sons Everett and Ralph at a seaside cottage in Charlottetown while Vic drew his cartoons in Bangor. Occasionally, he drove to Prince Edward Island to be with his family. The relationship worked. All his life he referred to Lee as his “Island Girl.”

Vic and Lee eventually were able to afford a fine older house at 101 Royal Road in Bangor. It served not only as a warm home to raise a family, but a larger place than the smaller West Side apartments to store his mountains of paper memorabilia and original cartoons by the greats of his day. Anything worth collecting was in the front upstairs room on Royal Road.

Later, when the Runtzes sold the property in Charlottetown because of encroaching development, he had the beloved old cottage where his sons were raised hauled out to spacious property on the north side of the island. He filled the cottage, two spare rooms in the home and the entire basement with all of his cartoons, vintage Life magazines, Mad magazines and newspapers.

Had he not been a cartoonist, Vic might have become a photographer, and a fine one. His penchant for collecting extended to his roomful of cameras and color slides. All of lush Prince Edward Island, it seemed, with its undulating countryside and copper red soil, had been photographed by Vic at some time. He snapped beach bathers – some suspecting, some not – at Cavendish and Brackley Beach. A favorite color slide was a study in grief: a woman, recently widowed from her husband of many years, sitting sadly and quietly at the kitchen table of her small Charlottetown apartment. She was Edith Saunders, his mother-in-law.

And then there were the cats. Any color, shape, age or temperament, they fascinated Vic. One, smiling and straight-whiskered, became his trademark. Let Vic describe him here, as he did in “Here today… ,” a collection of 25 years of his cartoons:

“A fellow traveler, who joined me at the start of my career on the Charlottetown Guardian, is a spry little cat in sporty bow tie. At 35, he keeps up best he can, always putting in an appearance. As yet unnamed, he has received many suggestions, some quite imaginative and not all derogatory.”

Cartoon connoisseurs note that the cat (never named, although Runtz is slang for cat in some German dialects and Vic was of German descent) predates the famous penguin that appears in all of Pulitzer Prize-winner Pat Oliphant’s cartoons.

Richard J. Warren, publisher of the NEWS, expressed the sadness felt by colleagues who had worked with Runtz at the family-owned newspaper to which he had devoted so much of his life.

“As an artist,” Warren said, “Vic was disciplined and professional, and he gave the NEWS editorial pages a dimension no other newspaper in Maine had, that of a regular, featured staff cartoonist. As a communicator he had a gift. He understood his readers. He connected with them and they with him. Everyone benefited from that relationship.”

Vic was a complicated man who sought to deliver a simple message. “We should be able to exist as brothers on this planet, as children of God,” Runtz once confided during an interview. Then, with his characteristic humility he added, “I realize that I don’t live up to my ideals, but I try to let my work reflect my attitude.”

By that self-imposed standard of achievement, Vic Runtz succeeded in his art, his craft and his life while his pen left its mark on a generation of Maine people.