KEITH LORENZ

LORENZ--Keith, age 86, died in Rockport, Maine on Wednesday, April 5, 2023. He was born in Manhattan December 3, 1936 to Keith Lorenz, a lawyer, and Helen Laimbeer, active in Republican Party politics in New York's Upper East Side. He attended Buckley School in New York City, St. Paul's School, Concord, NH, and Harvard College, Class of 1958. One college summer Keith tramped alone through the jungles of Chiapas, S. Mexico, where he encountered ancient Mayan ruins moldering in lost time. He was two years in the US Army, assigned to Frankfurt, Germany. On his discharge he lived a year on the Left Bank in Paris. Returning to New York he worked at Forbes Magazine. He then settled briefly in North Beach, San Francisco. However, on the invitation of his former boarding school roommate who worked in Thailand for a Pan Am subsidiary, he flew to Bangkok. He would remain in Southeast Asia in different capacities for twenty-five years. Initially he worked as a copywriter and researcher at Grant Advertising, a Chicago based firm with offices around the world, many of which provided cover for the CIA. As the war in Vietnam escalated Keith became a freelance stringer for various news organizations including NBC News, the London Daily Telegraph, VOA, and Mutual Broadcasting. He changed his Bangkok base to Singapore where he also became the co-owner of a 100 ft. Indonesian trading junk converted into a floating restaurant moored in the harbor. It doubled as the Singapore Foreign Correspondents Club. Keith returned to New York City in the mid-1970's where he worked at the UN in the Office of Public Information, writing radio scripts for foreign broadcast. Missing the Far East, Keith returned as the Southeast Asia correspondent of the New York Journal of Commerce, a venerable Wall Street newspaper, covering international trade and investment. He then moved to Honolulu where he worked in several roles as a writer for the East- West Center, a think tank and graduate student institution. Keith devoted much effort endeavoring to assist the long suffering, brutalized, Karen tribe of Burma whom he had encountered on the Thailand border twenty years earlier aiming to link them up with international aid and human rights organizations. Keith remained in Honolulu for over thirty years while also passing many summers in mid-coast Maine in an old farm house that he and his brother had bought as a family domicile. In his last years Keith met the former Ann (Andy) Collier Austin, earlier of Boston and Chicago. They lived together in Rockport, Maine for the rest of his life in a cozy house overlooking the picturesque harbor. Besides his partner, Keith leaves a nephew, John C. Lorenz, who maintains the family domicile in Morrill, Maine.