Joyce M Bowden

Joyce M Bowden, age 83, died June 12, 2022 of respiratory failure at Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital. Joyce was born in Thomaston, GA October 25, 1938, the first of three children born to Rachel (Connor) Bowden and Clarence M. Bowden, Jr. The family lived in several southern states during her childhood. She earned an undergraduate degree at Florida State University and a master’s degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Beginning in 1963 Joyce served more than two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer at a leprosarium in Los Negros, Bolivia. Her oral history interview is part of the Peace Corps collection at the JFK Library. During her professional life Joyce was a Central American field representative for a League of Women Voters education project; a fundraiser for Tufts, MIT and Brandeis; and a financial consultant at Merrill Lynch offices in Detroit, MI and Dayton, OH for two decades. After retirement in 2000, Joyce and her surviving husband, Adam Lutynski, returned to Boston. In 2013 Joyce published a meticulously researched history (685 endnotes) of her mother’s family: Four Connor Generations in South Carolina 1790–1920. She leaves unfinished a book about eight women founders of a Methodist church in Greenwood, SC during the late 1850’s. Survivors include her sister Diane of Richmond, VA, and her daughter, Rachel. Joyce’s brother, Clarence M. Bowden, III, predeceased her. There will be no service. Joyce’s spirit would be delighted if, in her memory, friends would perform, individually, an act of spontaneous, unrequited kindness for another person.