David Bigelow Bowes

Mr. Bowes, a former Washington correspondent of the St.Louis Post-Dispatch, a one-time vice president of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), an associate editor of the Cincinnati Post, and a contributor to Mid-Atlantic regional magazines, died Friday, May 13, 2022, of natural causes, according to his spouse, Rosemary T. Bowes, PhD., at the age of 88.

As he lay dying, surrounded by family members, Mr. Bowes listened to muted music of jazz guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli, jazz pianist Erroll Garner and Broadway chanteuse Blossom Dearie.

For more than 40 years he divided his time between his spouse's farm, The Oaks, in Washington County, MD, and a condominium near downtown D.C. During an earlier marriage he lived in Chevy Chase, MD.

Mr. Bowes grew up in a suburb of Toledo, OH, a city of manufacturers and lawyers. His manual dexterity was in the fourteenth percentile so "making things" was out. He considered a career in the law, but found it too much like mathematics-with-words for his comfort. For its part, the University of Michigan Law School found his commitment to clear, graceful English approaching poesy to be inappropriate. Accordingly, he transferred to the university's Rackham Graduate School in pursuit of a master's degree in journalism.

He committed himself to the goal once declared by a World War I foreign correspondent, Richard Harding Davis: "to say new things in an old way and old things in a new way" while always striving for accuracy. His first steep challenge was to apply this objective to the high school dating scene by way of a weekly called The Bee Hive.

Before earning the M.A., Mr. Bowes studied naval science in Navy ROTC for four years at the University of Virginia while earning a B.A. in English. His sea training was conducted aboard the USS CARPELLOTTI, APD 136, an attack transport. The curriculum ranged from squinting through celestial navigation instruments to aiming concussive gunnery to scouring saltwater toilet chutes known as heads. Mr. Bowes scoured some heads, then volunteered to write a shipboard newsletter.

He also co-edited the UVA Class of 1956 yearbook, Corks & Curls, and was a member of the Beta Theta Pi social fraternity. He ran 440-yard dashes and mile relays for the university's varsity track team and was admitted to the Eli Banana and Z honor societies.

After graduating "with distinction," Mr. Bowes served as a naval intelligence briefing officer in the Pentagon and at the National Security Agency, Ft. Meade, MD. There he conveyed global intelligence warnings to navy admirals and captains who stood duty watch overnight. He also managed the highly classified flow to and from communications technicians who handled intelligence traffic for the Washington intelligence community.

Mr. Bowes next moved to Ann Arbor, MI, and entered law school there. Always interested in the course material, but finally not the exams or the career, he eventually sighted a newspaper ad for a public lecture sponsored by the Department of Journalism. The speaker was Paul Block, the publisher of the Toledo Blade, his hometown paper. The encounter led to a summer internship there and the university's McNaught Medal for excellence in journalism education.

During his Michigan years, Mr. Bowes entered a two-year postgraduate internship administered jointly by Michigan and the esteemed St. Louis Post-Dispatch published by Joseph Pulitzer's successors. He paid minimum tuition to the university; twice a year the department chairman, Prof. Wesley Maurer, visited St. Louis to be certain Mr. Bowes was not being marooned on any particular beat. Mr. Bowes filed copies of his key dispatches monthly for critique by the campus faculty. He was named a University of Michigan Journalism Fellow.

On his first assignment in St. Louis, he was sent to cover a coroners' inquest for Maye (cq) Trainor, the city's premier madam and whorehouse hostess to Babe Ruth when Ruth's New York Yankees were in town. Later, near the end of a decade in St. Louis, Mr. Bowes arranged for a rare conversation with Dr. William Masters, the acclaimed sex researcher who had been working essentially under cover in that conservative city. But soon thereafter, when the doctor's first book was published worldwide, the Post-Dispatch declined to acknowledge or review it on grounds that "some readers might be offended.”

It was the first of two occasions on which the paper disappointed Mr. Bowes by not covering stories in as mature a fashion as its East and West coast counterparts. The other occasion was when Mr. Bowes filed a story from a Florida nudist colony. The story was ''spiked" despite its scholarly context. Mr. Bowes had been sent coast to coast to measure cultural change; the headline he chose for this particular essay, given Oh! Calcutta!'s acclaimed run on Broadway, was "Nudism vs. Nudity."

Mr. Bowes won the Con (cq) Lee Kelliher award for news reporting from the St. Louis chapter of Sigma Delta Chi, a professional journalism society. By then he was the youngest member of the paper's editorial board. In this capacity he was responsible for organizing editorial studies and internal debate on arms control and disarmament, the seasons of weather, continental Africa, science and medicine, literature, merchant shipping, the Mississippi River lock system and Southern Illinois politics.

Mr. Bowes covered President Lyndon B. Johnson's five-day circumnavigation of the planet in 1968 from his new base in Washington, D.C. He ate tear gas at the Democratic National Convention, reporting in turn to Robert Lasch (cq), editor of the editorial page, and Marquis Childs, syndicated Washington correspondent for the paper.

During the 1970s, following two years as a copywriter and account executive with the Henry J. Kaufman advertising and public relations agency in Georgetown, a historic neighborhood in D.C., the restless Mr. Bowes was brought to Cincinnati by the Cincinnati Post's new editor, Walter Friedenberg, a former overseas correspondent for Scripps-Howard Newspapers. Mr. Friedenberg needed an op-ed columnist and editorial page editor grounded in the American Midwest. Mr. Bowes signed on for both. He dug into his own midwestern background and also interpreted the high-growth coastal states he had studied while covering political campaigns around the country.

He was cited by the Scripps Howard Foundation for "outstanding editorials that produced results" by saving an historic Cincinnati hillside neighborhood from demolition for an interstate highway. He was also the editorial voice for preservationists who saved Cincinnati Union Terminal railroad station, an Art Deco landmark that in due course became the new home of the Cincinnati Historical Society. In addition, Mr. Bowes was elected to membership in the venerable Literary Club of Cincinnati.

One day a delegation from the Columbus Monthly called. They were in an expansionist mode. The independent city magazine in Cleveland on Lake Erie was too strong for them to challenge. But Cincinnati magazine, published by the local chamber of commerce, was constrained by its member companies from exercising full editorial freedom and thus was considered vulnerable. Mr. Bowes became editor of Columbus Monthly's new sister magazine and Cincinnati magazine's new challenger: Queen City magazine. He hired a feisty, young staff and got out two informative issues, whereupon the chamber went to court over title similarities, declared an advertising boycott by its members and the battle was soon declared over. A chamber of commerce that existed to promote free enterprise instead had engaged in it and snuffed the fledgling competition.

Mr. Bowes specialized overall in urban affairs journalism. The American Political Science Association recognized him in 1970 for 60 essays written while roving nationally; their insights later informed his commentary on city planning, urban design and historic preservation. Drawing on experience as a marketing communications consultant, he served on a design jury and for seven years wrote a three-times-weekly urban affairs column, "In Search of Cincinnati.”

Along the way he was a freelance editor-at-large for Mid-Atlantic Country monthly magazine and a contributing writer for Chesapeake Bay, a monthly boating magazine. En route by highway to conduct distant interviews for magazine stories, he kept stopping at roadside lunch counters within the eight-state circulation area. In addition to adding pounds, these pauses inspired brief monthly "barbecue bulletins.” He wrote and the magazine published north of 50 before the novelty wore off:

PARALLEL UNIVERSE Barbecue Bulletin No. 53: The arrow along Route 301 near Newberg, MD, points down smaller Route 257E through the slash pine. Don't let this be the road not taken. Within a mile you'll find James Barnes, sans sign, smoking ribs over white oak and adding his signature sauce. "We're gravity fed," Barnes explains. "No exhaust fans, just gravity taking smoke up the chimney." Unconventional physics, without a doubt, but who cares when we're talkin' barbecue? Call 301 259-4641.

Mr. Bowes conceived and wrote a business development manual for members of the American Institute of Architects. In addition, a second book, titled Creating the Globally Competitive Community, was published jointly by the manufacturers' association and by Partners for Livable Communities where he was a senior associate. He also authored Trail Mix: A Writing Life Enhanced by Attention Deficit Disorder. (Amazon)

Though he worked on factory assembly lines during two summers from college, Mr. Bowes came late to a grasp of manufacturing's core importance to national economies. To his surprise, he found his early disinterest to be changing. Policy leaders with the National Association of Manufacturers, persuasive and in the vanguard, promoted issues such as job training, human and natural resources, tax reform and regulation, foreign trade and robotics to influence legislation. These advances burnished the "Rust Belt" in its high-stakes but eventually successful competition with Japanese manufacturers.

Mr. Bowes joined the Washington headquarters of the NAM as director of policy communication. Initially his principal duty was to provide speech writing support for the Hon. Alexander B. Trowbridge, who was its new president after a career in business and as Secretary of Commerce in the Johnson Administration. Later, as vice president of communications, Mr. Bowes managed a department of 12 and edited the NAM's policy magazine Enterprise.

After formal retirement, Mr. Bowes became a general contractor of sorts to build a new farmhouse—a creative blend of vintage farmstead and contemporary design from the board of Barbara Mullenex, AIA, who consulted him frequently. A Mennonite family company—Eldon Lehman Home Improvement—handled all construction over two years, teaching Mr. Bowes to "measure twice and cut once." He did as he was told by the talented, pious and enjoyable Mr. Lehman.

David Bigelow Bowes was born in St. Louis and reared in Perrysburg, OH, a suburb of Toledo. His father, Urban E. Bowes, was director of research at Owens-Illinois Glass Co. David attended local public and private schools as well as Ridley College boarding school in St. Catharines (cq), Ontario, Canada. He played varsity basketball but had to matriculate in a foreign land to do so.

He was a trustee of the Washington Theological Consortium for ecumenical and interfaith outreach, chaired the board of the then College of Preachers (now the Virginia Mae Center) at Washington National Cathedral, and was a trustee of the International Eye Foundation.

Mr. Bowes enjoyed classic jazz, bluegrass and Gospel music as well as cruising on the Chesapeake Bay and its riparian waterways—successively aboard three sailboats (cq) all named LUCID INTERVAL, as well as a diesel work boat called DR. ROSEMARY (in the custom of naming oyster boats after womenfolk.) He was a reader in science, nature, philosophy, and theology. He hung out with a book discussion group every other month for 30 years and was a member of the Cosmos Club of Washington, D.C. His children speak of his lifelong boyish enthusiasm, insatiable curiosity, ability to see the best in people, and inclination to ponder life's plentiful ironies.

His first marriage to the late Judith Gregory ended in divorce; they remained friends. She is interred in a Gregory family mausoleum in Corning, NY.

A memorial service for Mr. Bowes and interment in the St. Alban’s Episcopal Church columbarium will take place at a later date. Some ashes will be cast adrift by family where the Choptank River flows into the Chesapeake.

Survivors include his spouse of 33 years, psychologist Rosemary Tofalo Bowes, PhD., of Washington, D.C.; three children from his first marriage: Ginger Walker of South Portland, ME, Gregory Bigelow Bowes (Alice Patterson Albright) of Washington, D.C., and Martha Hopkins Bowes (William Michael Dallman) of Tucson, AZ; and two grandsons, David Albright Bowes and Daniel Korbel Bowes.

Tributes in lieu of flowers may be sent to a charity of the reader's choice. Consider Chesapeake Bay Foundation, American Civil Liberties Union, Mennonite Central Committee, Episcopal Relief Committee, Anti-Defamation League, Catholic Relief Services or Islamic Services USA.