Howie Schneider, 77; was Cape Cod artist and activist

To hear Howie Schneider tell it, he was an artist by the time he drew his first breath -- or shortly thereafter.

"Howie insists -- and he was known to embellish -- that he could draw before he could walk. In the delivery room he drew," said his wife, Susan Seligson of Truro. "Howie drew constantly. He always knew he was going to be an artist."

Drawing tiny faces on his fingers and cutting holes in a paper napkin, he could put on a puppet show at a Provincetown restaurant as nimbly as he created nationally syndicated comic strips such "Eek and Meek" and children's books, including the Amos the dog series he wrote with his wife, modeling its character on an Irish setter she had owned.

Mr. Schneider, who penned the "Unschucked" cartoon each week for the Provincetown Banner, died Thursday in Massachusetts General Hospital of complications from heart bypass surgery. At 77, his current syndicated strip reflected the advance of years: "The Sunshine Club -- Life in Generation Rx."

"You get in the habit of looking at the world through these little droplets of humor," he told Editor & Publisher magazine in 2004. "If you don't have characters' mouths to put observations in, you feel frustrated. It's like taking away a ventriloquist's dummy."

Moving to Provincetown 35 years ago, Mr. Schneider delved into environmental activism and town affairs with such vigor that he became one of the community's most recognizable year-rounders -- that segment of population that did not flee the tip of Cape Cod after Labor Day. Though he moved to Truro with his wife several years ago, Mr. Schneider seemed to know nearly everyone he encountered on the streets of Provincetown , greeting many with a hug, a kiss, or both.

"He was a voice you could always count on at Town M eeting," said Alix Ritchie, publisher of the Provincetown Banner. "Inevitably at one point he would get up and cut through everything and make a point that would stop everyone in their tracks -- this common sense, 'What are you doing?' comment. I think we all relied on Howie being there.

"It was just terrible when they moved to Truro. We wanted him to have some honorary status so he could come back to Town Meeting every year and make his points."

In 1986, Mr. Schneider banded with others to launch the Yearrounders Festival, a celebration of the community that stayed through the winter that was held in early February .

"I really prefer it here in the off-season," he told the Globe just before the first festival. "There is a wonderful freedom of movement. You can go anywhere you want without being impeded by traffic. And this time of year Provincetown doesn't have the strangeness or the wildness of summer. It is quiet, a good place for me to do my work."

Born in the Bronx, N.Y., he spent much of the first half of his life in New York City, where he was living in 1965 when "Eek and Meek" began its 35-year run in syndication. Initially featuring two mice that wrestled with the world's problems, the characters slowly evolved and became people midway through the series.

Mr. Schneider's other comic strips were "Percy's World" and "Bimbo's Circus," which also was known as "The Circus of P.T. Bimbo," and his cartoons were published in magazines such as Esquire, McCall's, The New Yorker, Playboy, and Redbook. He had served on the boards of the National Cartoonists Society and the Newspapers Features Council, and had won awards for his cartoons.

Along with collections of his work, he published children's books such as "Chewy Louie," about a little black puppy whose enthusiasm for tail-wagging is matched by his fervor for gnawing on everything within reach.

Cartoons, comic strips, and books tapped only part of his creativity, though. He was a sculptor who worked in plaster, bronze, and terra - cotta. And vegetables.

"He was always using what was around for characters," Seligson said. "He could make an entire character out of a string bean."

Sketchbooks were constant companions. Mr. Schneider filled enough to create a lending library of the imagination.

"When we travel together, we never take a camera, but Howie fills up books," his wife said. "Because he drew, wherever we were we made friends. He'd be standing outside a mosque drawing and men would come out from their prayers and gather around."

After visiting for years, Mr. Schneider first moved to Provincetown to raise one of his two sons from a previous marriage. Like many native New Yorkers, he abandoned Manhattan by degrees. He initially held onto a $400-a-month walk-up in Greenwich Village before making the Cape his only home in the late 1970s.

By then he was a local activist, having taken on a marine development project and a radar project at Otis Air Force Base. Nearly a decade later, in February 1986, Mr. Schneider extolled the virtues of staying in one place after he came up with the Yearrounders Festival.

"People think we're nothing but a caretaker population that puts up the plywood in the fall and takes it down in the spring," he told the Globe. "But we're a New England village like any other, with all the same problems and issues. We decided to have a festival to celebrate each other and our community at a time when the rest of the world couldn't care less about us."

Mr. Schneider and Seligson became a couple more than 20 years ago and married in 1992. She said he relished the commonplace rituals of always shopping at the same grocery store, visiting the same copy shop with his latest comics and cartoons, and going to the post office to send them off to the world beyond the dunes.

"He loved walking through the Grand Union and hearing someone call out, 'Great cartoon this week!' I used to say, 'Of course you like to do the shopping; it's a total ego rush,' " she said. "But really, he gave as much as he got. And he really got into the sweet rhythm of life here. He liked the peace of just being in his studio for hours and hours and hours or driving to the beach to sit and write."

During the winters, he would eat lunch each day at Napi's Restaurant, where his presence was anticipated and welcomed.

"We had a table for him and a reading lamp. He's the kind of person you build a place like this for," said Napi Van Dereck, who owns the restaurant with his wife, Helen. "We had a particular item on the menu that he liked, we called it Japanese soup. He loved that dish and he'd have it with tea. He liked the corner, he liked to get off to one side where no one would bother him."

Mr. Schneider, Van Dereck said, "was a man of subtle humor. He was just easy to chat with. It's a tough thing to lose a friend like that."

In addition to his wife, Mr. Schneider leaves two sons, Evan of Attleboro and Peter of New York City.

A memorial service will be announced later in the summer.