James Harrison Bowers, M.D.

(March 18, 1927-March 25, 2004)

Born in Gastonia, North Carolina, the son of General Jess and Sue Annie Todd Bowers, Jim was reared by his great-aunt Harriet Frazier Johnson, his father, and his stepmother Mildred after the death of his mother when he was three. He also spent many happy childhood summers with his maternal grandmother, Annie Laurie Frazier Todd Dillard, in West Union. These experiences are recounted in his memoir, The Sentimental Journey of Poor Little Jimmy (Billy Goat Press, 2002).

After graduating from Winthrop Training School, he attended Clemson University and the Medical College of South Carolina at Charleston. He also served in the U.S. Navy. After completing his internship at the Orangeburg Regional Hospital, he began his medical practice in Walhalla in 1957. He eventually left private practice to work in student health at Florida State University and later at Clemson University and the University of Georgia. Upon his retirement he took up full-time residence at his home on Crystal Lake in Mountain Rest. He had been a member of the Blue Ridge #92 Masonic Lodge for more than fifty years.

In 1949 Jim married Mary Alberta Ramey of Mountain Rest. From this union came three children: Jane Harriet, James Harrison, Jr., and John Hughes. Jane is married to Robert Hill; they reside in Marietta, Georgia. James, who lives in Walhalla, is married to Sarah Griffin. John and his wife Lisa live in Mountain Rest. Three grandchildren—Jane’s daughter Betsy Martin, who lives in Kennesaw, Georgia, and Jess Ramey and Addie Rae Bowers, who live with John and Lisa in Mountain Rest—also survive their beloved Grandpa.

On March 20, 1974, Jim married Joyce Rhodes Perritt, who steadfastly supported him through thirty years as well as his final illness. They celebrated their thirtieth anniversary two days after his seventy-seventh birthday, two major events that marked his final week. Jim is also survived by his stepson Scott Perritt.

Among the passions of his life were flying and golf. For many years he was a licensed pilot and flew his own plane. He also did physical exams for the Federal Aviation Administration, helping to keep other avid pilots in the air. At his home on Crystal Lake Jim built a small golf course that has become locally famous—LaWinda is known as the site of the annual July 4^th tournament, recorded in his reports to the Keowee Courier. A more recent avocation for him had been writing. He had recently completed a second volume of his memoirs, based on his experiences as a volunteer physician in Vietnam during the summer of 1970. Titled Bend with the Wind, it will be published on July 4^th and debut at a memorial service in his honor.

Many people beyond his immediate family survive him, especially his beloved sister, Sue Bowers Dickman, and her son, Jed. He is also the much-loved uncle of Margaret Queen Hiser, Bill Queen, Benny Queen, Howard Queen (whose first name is James, for his uncle), and Bobby Ramey, Helen Ramey Carroll, and Betty Ramey Padgett. He has two step-grandsons, Mike and Jay Hill, and two step-great-grandchildren, Luke and Aubrey.

Eulogy: March 28, 2004

St. Luke United Methodist Church

Walhalla, South Carolina

Between the time my mother called me to tell me that my father had again taken a turn for the worse—sometime after three a.m.—and when she called back to tell me that he had died, perhaps an hour later, I stayed in bed. We didn’t turn on a light, we didn’t talk, but neither Bob nor I went back to sleep. We held each other and listened to our boxer, Scout, snore. Scout is eleven, so if we calculate his age multiplying dog years times seven, he and Daddy shared the age that Daddy reached on his last birthday, just one week before his death—77. A serendipity, Daddy would tell us. He had pointed out innumerable serendipities to us in the past couple of years. So in Thursday’s sad early hours, we listened to Scout and waited.

The image that came to me those long minutes was the image of my father that he had both internalized and immortalized—a young boy’s face captured in the photo that his long-dead father had carried in his long-lost wallet. That face is the face Daddy chose to place within the aviator’s cap of his childhood hero, Colonel Lindbergh, and having placed himself there, he began the journey of self-discovery that was a final stage in the building project of his life.

In his poem “Birches,” Robert Frost constructs the image of a young boy who longs to transcend earthly life by riding a pliable birch tree upward toward heaven, but the adult speaker of the poem recognizes that the youthful game of riding birches is only that, a game, and that any sensible human would want ultimately to return to earth, to have the thrill of the approach toward heaven but, in the end, to find himself firmly back on earth, according to the poem, the right place for love. I want to talk about my father’s life as boy and man, as a player of games and as a lover of his family and this earthly kingdom, this life. I want to celebrate the edifice that he constructed within which we continue to dwell—this edifice called family, a construction of quirks and slants and steps of irregular rise, yet one in which, amazingly and gracefully, all is relatively well.

To want to transcend by flight is not a surprising goal for a boy who came into the world when my father, a child of the Age of Flight, did. My brothers and I can testify to his stubborn faith in that dream, having been marched through the Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian more times than we attended family reunions, having paced off the route of the Wright Brothers’ initial flight at Kitty Hawk more times than the Wrights ever flew, and never having crossed the border into Ohio without multiple visits to the Air Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near the Dickmans’ home in Tipp City. As a teenager, I did not experience my father’s generosity with his flight dream as a meaningful connection. I found it boring.

But having read my father’s narrative of his life, I now see his dream not only in the coincidence of his birth and the moment of Lindbergh, but also in the arc of his life as a boy who lost his mother before he was old enough to remember her, who spent much of his childhood shuttling back and forth between homes, who wondered where he would be and who he would be from day to day in a fundamental way. No wonder the idea of flying away from the confusing earthly world in which he found himself appealed to him. No wonder he constructed Rube Goldbergesque-flying machines almost from the time he could say the word flight.

But, as Frost’s poem suggests, ours are complicated impulses, for just as my father’s childhood logically suggests a desire to escape, it also suggests a profound longing for a fixed and single home. Thus it is that my brothers and I were never taken anywhere except to locations associated with the history of flight and to our cabin at Crystal Lake, the place Daddy loved most on this earth.

Once Daddy found this home, he and James and I camped out—our first night on our lake property. We slept in a trailer with air mattresses blown up and spread across the floor, a canvas tarp over us for a roof. In the morning we ate cereal out of little boxes that you split open, pouring milk straight into the box. From that primitive beginning, my father’s spiritual address was never other than the property on the cove at Crystal Lake. He lived in finer homes on bigger lakes certainly. But the part of him that had always wondered where he belonged answered that question in the mid-1950s, and for a half-century his heart knew that Crystal Lake was the right place for him to live and love. When retirement let him make that official—when Crystal Lake became his permanent home, he didn’t need to fly anymore. He spoke of wanting to fly, but he didn’t need to fly. He was home and happy to be there.

The houses—the actual structures—that exist at Crystal Lake have been built, literally, by Daddy. During the time he was in the hospital, one long, frustrating Saturday found him disoriented as a result of septic shock. Joyce and I and later John found ourselves listening to a repeated list of building supplies—and I do mean repeated, again and again: yardstick, pipe, dowel, chain, lattice, sheeting.

A respiratory therapist heard Daddy going through the routine for the millionth time and said to John, “Was he a builder?”

John thought for a minute, grinned, and said, “Not really. He was a physician. But he was an accomplished weekend builder.”

Even before he retired, on his property at Crystal Lake, Daddy built a golf course. The first time I saw it, my first thought was “Betsy’s college education.” I actually said this aloud to Bob. A silly thought, one that makes the golf course sound much more grandiose than it is, for one thing, and me much more aggrandizing than I am. But it also demonstrates that we need time—often quite a long time—to understand the structures that our loved ones build. For the golf course that my father built is not, in fact, a golf course, or it is a golf course in name and in fact—golf is played on it. But in essence it is a community, a region, even, a place with a specific population and a mythos, a set of cultural practices and beliefs that binds it together and that gives the lives of those who inhabit it meaning. My father built this thing. It was, as novelist Lee Smith writes, the building itself that “signified,” not the thing that got built or the way that it appeared to a world that might read it as the act of a goofy human. Because I or someone else looking from the outside saw grown men playing on a playground they built and maintain as if it were “real” and didn’t see what actually signified says more about me or the someone else and our inabilities to “get it” than it says about the activity of the builder.

This is what I have learned about my father in the past three years or so. He was intent not only on building very specific things in his life, but in our understanding the process of his having built them. My class this semester is a graduate seminar on metafiction and the domestic novel. I won’t bore you with what this is about in any detail—that would be like walking you through the Air and Space Museum. But trust me, this is a huge serendipity, because my Daddy had become at the end of his life a first-rate metafictionalist of the domestic space. He wanted us to be aware that he was aware of the deal here—he set about writing his life in order to make his life right.

My brothers and I are baby-boomers; Betsy, Jess, and Addie are children of baby-boomers. Demographically we should have lived Leave It to Beaver lives of Cleaver-esque idealization. But like much else that my father built, his domestic space was not completely regular—it had twists and turns and steps of irregular rise. Still, he worked to make it work. Last Monday, when James, Sarah, and I had stayed the night before at the hospital with Joyce and were too exhausted to do it again—though, of course, I didn’t want to admit that, for Joyce was not saying that she was too exhausted—I was sitting at my mother’s house talking to her and Jess about who would go down to be there. Jess said without an ounce of prompting from aunt or grandmother, “I can go stay with Grandpa.” And he did, for that night and the next. That sweet Jess is a part of the structure that my father has helped to construct, irregular though it may be.

My sisters-in-law have spent far more of those seventy-five days at the hospital than I have. We could attribute that to geography—they live closer than I do, but it is more than that. Lisa and Sarah have understood the essence of the structure that is family—that is why they have been there. My brothers do work that is not paid if you are not there—every day they were at the hospital was a day they did not earn a living. That is not a statement that I can make—I get paid whether I show up or not. When I think of this—in fact, when I think of them with my father for all the years of his retirement—I think of James and John pouring living into him—they were giving out a living rather than taking one in. This is an ultimate generosity. These are the men that my parents have constructed, however irregular their blueprint.

On the afternoon of Daddy’s irrational building project in the hospital—yardstick, pipe, dowel, chain, lattice, sheeting—at one point poor Joyce—this hero of immeasurable proportions, this guardian angel who spent seventy-five days tenderly, devotedly, lovingly caring for her husband when two or three days would have wiped out the staunchest individual going—found herself laughing in that way you laugh when you are exhausted and hysterical and beyond comfort and cannot, for love or money, stop laughing even if your life—or the life of someone you love dearly—depends on it. Both that devotion and that laughter are marks that she is integral to the structure that my father has erected.

My father became a grandfather in 1971. He writes in his book about how long it took him to construct himself as Grandpa, to see himself in that role and understand how much it pleased him. When Betsy was very small—his only grandchild—and we would be together at Crystal Lake, she and Daddy would often be the first people up in the morning. I would sometimes wake up to see them out in the yard, busy about some activity—he had a hard time imagining himself as Grandpa, perhaps, but he knew that he wanted this person to be part of the project that was his heart. In December Daddy came to Marietta for a day of dining and movies and martinis made by Betsy—how lucky for him that a thing she has learned to build professionally is a good martini. How lucky for him that Jess became an athlete and that we began to travel together as a family to his games. That travel is, I think, part of the rebuilding process that culminated in Daddy’s book. And how serendipitous for Daddy that Addie has become the hostess at Puerto Nuevo, his favorite restaurant, for puerto nuevo means “new port.” Daddy saw Betsy graduate from college; he saw Jess graduate from high school—he will miss these milestones in Addie’s life. But when I saw her sitting in her hostess chair reading a novel on Tuesday night, waiting to seat the next guests, and as I’ve thought about the lovely significance of the restaurant’s name in the context of Daddy’s death, I have taken comfort in imagining that there is for him in his new port a lovely essence of Addieness to seat him, to bring him his beverage, to assure him that his server will be with him to bring him exactly what he wants.

In the life that my father built, love has been exactly as novelist Louise Erdrich describes it: bulky and hard to carry, like a package that keeps coming untied. But he has toted that awkward package to the very end. On Tuesday, when he still had the ventilator tube in his throat, he insisted on writing me a note to ask, “Where is Bob?” He wanted to know where everyone he loved was. He needed to know that his house was in order, that the construction project was complete.

After today, I will always understand the Frost poem in a different way, for I believe my father has figured out how to have it both ways, as he so often did: I think he is flying outward on the accommodating trunk of a beautiful birch, speeding in his Little Jimmy youthful beauty into heaven with no fear, no pain, toward his mother at last and Aunt Harriet—this man who managed to have two of so many things, toward his father and Mother Todd and our precious Buster, who await him joyfully, but at the same time, as we commit him to the earth, he gets to remain grounded—on Earth, the right place for love, for he has written his story, he has told us himself, as few people ever do. We know him, and that becomes his charge to us, our sacred responsibility, his immortality—he gets it all, for as long as we are here and continue to tell and love his story, he still gets the earthly love too. What a deal for poor little Jimmy! What a builder he was, for a weekend man. What a physician he was, to spend these last years healing his family and himself.

My mother said to me on Thursday night, “Well, we had three beautiful children and three beautiful grandchildren.”

I said, “I’m thinking your grandchildren are a lot more beautiful than your children.”

She thought for a minute, frowned at me, then said, “Well, I guess they are.”

As you leave today, look at those three beautiful young people and imagine for how many more decades Little Jimmy has ensured that his stories will be heard. He’s even ensured that the tellers will be beautiful. As e.e. cummings once said, “death i think is no parenthesis.” Daddy’s story does not end.

--Jane Bowers Hill