Robin Lobeck Leaman, a longtime summer resident of the Robin’s Nest cottage in the MVCMA Camp Ground, died July 17 in New York city. She was 85.

Born on Independence Day in 1930 in Coral Gables, Florida, Robin was the seventh child of Packard and Anne Lobeck. She started coming to the Vineyard in the 1940s, when her father bought a summer cottage on Commonwealth avenue, following in the footsteps of his brother, geomorphologist Armin Lobeck, who had purchased a cottage on Trinity Circle.

Robin graduated from Swarthmore College in 1951 with a Bachelor of Arts in psychology, minoring in music. She went on to graduate school in New York city, where she lived as a single woman in Greenwich Village for nearly 10 years. During that time she received an Master of Arts in psychology from The New School for Social Research and taught psychology courses at Wagner College. She worked on theories of perception with James Bieri and his research team at Columbia University, and their work was published as Clinical and Social Judgment: The Discrimination of Behavioral Information (John Wiley, 1966). The research she did as a graduate student with Irvin Rock at the New School was later published in Indirect Perception (MIT Press, 1997).

Robin was vacationing on Monhegan Island, off of Maine, when she met John Leaman, managing editor of Footwear News; it turned out they lived blocks from each other back in Greenwich Village. Robin and John married and had two children, Jessica and Sarah. Summer vacations on the Vineyard with extended family were an essential part of their lives. Robin was very fond of the community in the Camp Ground. All her life, and even into her 80s, she enjoyed working on her antique cottage, doggedly doing as much of the painting and repairs as she could herself, as her father had before her. She preserved the architectural integrity of her cottage, with its original Victorian charm and simplicity.

In her younger years Robin devoted great passion and discipline to her study of both flute and cello, and throughout her life she loved to sing. Her repertoire reflected her eclectic taste, and her favorite records ranged from Galli-Curci to Louis Armstrong, Bach to Harry Belafonte, with plenty of Lead Belly, Jean Ritchie, Pete Seeger, and early Dylan and Beatles. Robin sang alto in the Choral Society at Grace Church in New York and in the Tabernacle church choir in Oak Bluffs — and was always the conductor in the family car! She kept an extensive archive of the many folk songs, canons, camp songs, and silly jingles she had learned throughout her life, and she enjoyed sharing these with company.

All her life, Robin worked hard. After the birth of her first child, Robin became a stay-at-home mother, devoted to the care and education of her daughters and to volunteering at their schools as well as in her community. She created a loving home, full of books, pets of all kinds, and humor. Naturally detail-oriented and concerned about those in need, in the 1990s Robin entered the new field of professional home organizing. She worked to help New Yorkers with a wide range of organizational issues, including people whose hoarding had taken a serious toll on their lives. In this way she applied her psychology training, listening to her clients’ fears and anxieties and patiently and empathically helping them declutter.

Robin was deeply committed to her community. Horrified by the racial segregation she had been a part of as a white child growing up in Florida, she was drawn toward issues of justice and solidarity with those in need. As a young woman, she joined the March on Washington and protested the Vietnam War. In her later years, she became involved in helping elderly New Yorkers. She was outreach coordinator for Visiting Neighbors, a nonprofit agency that provides services to homebound seniors, and she was on the board of several Interagency Councils on Aging.

An enthusiastic expert on fine points of grammar and punctuation, and a formidable player of Boggle and Scrabble, Robin was also copyeditor for her husband’s newsletter for respiratory patients and their caregivers, Respiratory News and Views.

Ever concerned about being prepared, and helping others be prepared, at the age of 80 Robin was trained as a Certified Emergency Responder, so that in the event of a disaster she could be on hand to serve fellow New Yorkers with her skills in emergency evacuation, CPR, and firefighting. Robin was an inspiring example of determination and self-sufficiency. She continued to work at her several jobs, negotiating the streets of Manhattan toting her heavy oxygen tank uptown and down, until she succumbed to lung cancer this summer.

Robin was a deeply curious person, engaged in the world around her, concerned about the future of the planet, and tireless in doing her best to help others. Her wit, warmth, and integrity are deeply missed. Robin is mourned by her husband of 54 years, John, her daughters Jessica and Sarah, and her grandchildren, Josephine Orr and Jake Kozloski.

A memorial service will be held in New York city on Saturday, Sept. 26, at Grace Church, 802 Broadway, at 11 a.m. All are welcome.

Donations in her honor may be sent to the National Emphysema Foundation or the Environmental Defense Fund.