Norman F. Lent, 11-Term Congressman From Long Island, Dies at 81 Norman F. Lent, who in his 11 terms in Congress representing a large swath of Long Island's South Shore was a significant voice in shaping environmental legislation, despite always being in the minority, died on June 11 at his home in Arlington, Va. Mr. Lent, a Republican, was 81. The cause was complications of cancer, John Hambel, a friend and longtime Congressional aide, said. Mr. Lent, whose district in Nassau County was reconfigured several times during his years in Congress - from 1971 to 1993 - rose to become the ranking minority member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The committee oversees legislation on the environment, the oil industry, cable television and other matters. Mr. Lent was known for his willingness to compromise. With the panel's chairman, Representative John D. Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, he was a co-sponsor in 1990 of major amendments to the Clean Air Act, which President Richard M. Nixon had signed 20 years earlier - among them regulations to limit toxic air emissions and acid rain. He was also a sponsor of the 1980 law that created the Superfund, the federal government's program to clean up the nation's hazardous waste sites. And he helped pass laws that banned oil dumping in Long Island Sound; placed Peconic Bay, on Long Island's North Fork, in the National Estuary Program; and banned the dumping of municipal sewage in oceans. "He has put imprints on landmark legislation, mainly serving as the emissary of Republican presidents in the tough environment of Energy and Commerce, but sometimes breaking with the White House on environmental issues," Newsday wrote in 1992. Lawrence Levy, executive dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University on Long Island, said on Monday that Mr. Lent "was one of the first green Republicans, one of those people who do not see the environment as an enemy," adding that he "was a moderate on most issues in a way that reflected the growing middle-of-the-road suburban constituency that marked Nassau County." Mr. Lent, who was a state senator for eight years before being elected to Congress, considered himself a moderate conservative. He won his seat in the House in 1970 by defeating the incumbent, Allard K. Lowenstein, a liberal Democrat and prominent critic of the Vietnam War. As a state senator in 1965, Mr. Lent strongly opposed an order issued by the state education commissioner requiring the integration of public elementary schools in Malverne, N.Y., because, he said, it would undermine the neighborhood school concept. As chairman of the Legislature's Joint Committee on Public Health, he was a proponent of liberalizing New York's abortion law, which at the time permitted abortions only to save the life of the mother. He was also a leading proponent of a state ban on the use of DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides. "We continue to play a game of chemical roulette with man's biological future," he said. We've got to stop this. Norman Frederick Lent Jr. was born in Oceanside, N.Y., on March 23, 1931, to Norman and Nellie Bain Lent. His father was a Nassau County District Court judge. Norman Jr. graduated from Hofstra in 1952 and, after serving in the Navy for two years, received his law degree from Cornell in 1957. Before running for office, he served as a law clerk to a State Supreme Court justice and as a police judge in the Village of East Rockaway. Mr. Lent's first marriage, to Nancy Budlong, ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife of 32 years, Barbara Morris-Lent; a son, Norman III; a daughter, Barbara Anne Roberts; a half-brother, Robert; and five grandchildren. Mr. Lent chose not to run for re-election in 1992 after his district was redrawn for a second time. Soon after that he formed a lobbying firm in Washington. "You have to wonder how a guy like Norman Lent would have fared today, when nobody seems to talk to anybody on the other side of the aisle," Mr. Levy of Hofstra said. I suspect he would have been very frustrated. Then again, if anybody could have made it work, it would have been him.