Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 16, 1992 TAG: 9202170255
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
BOWERS PRIDES HIMSELF ON ROOTS IN HARD-WORKING MIDDLE CLASS
DAVID BOWERS views the world through the prism of class - and his own middle-class upbringing. That inspires his supporters but frightens some opponents.One sadly beautiful Sunday morning in April 1974, 21-year-old David Bowers woke up, sat in his bed, and wondered what to do with the rest of his life.
The rejection letter from Catholic University's law school that arrived on Thursday had been a big blow - especially coming on top of the rejection letter from Georgetown.
Worse yet, Bowers was out $50 - big money for the son of a bread-truck driver with six children to feed. Bowers had begged each law school to refund the $25 application fee if he wasn't accepted. They wouldn't.
Bowers flipped through Barron's guide to law schools. A deeply religious young man, Bowers had his heart set on attending a Catholic law school in a big city. But all the schools Barron's listed required the same $25 application fee, except one in New Orleans, which cost $15.
"I remember sitting in my bed and saying, `I won't spend another $25 to go to law school, but I've got $15,' so I did, and I got accepted."
Bowers tells the story to illustrate both his humble background and explain a resume that reads much differently than that of other Virginia politicians - college at Belmont Abbey, a tiny Catholic school in North Carolina, law school at Loyola.
It's a tale further spiced by Bowers' account of working three jobs to pay his way through law school - delivering newspapers in the mornings, working at Chef Paul Prudhomme's Commander's Palace restaurant by night, later waiting tables at the touristy Cafe DuMonde.
"Those were skimpy days," Bowers says. "Once I had $60, and that was supposed to last me a month or two."
Bowers' hard-luck tales about clawing his way into the legal profession go a long way toward explaining why he views the world through the prism of class.
"I was born a shanty Irishman, and I will die a shanty Irishman," he says. "I like representing the middle class. That's my key constituency. I think the middle class should align themselves politically with the working class and the poor and the elderly and minorities. That's Rooseveltian."
It's also a touchy subject most local politicians studiously avoid. But Bowers' emphasis on class politics still doesn't fully explain quite why he so rankles Roanoke's business community.
After all, his opponent for the Democratic nomination for mayor, Howard Musser, led a middle-class taxpayer revolt against the business-backed Roanoke Forward City Council in the late '70s. Yet Musser never aroused the passions Bowers routinely does.
But then Bowers starts to tell another story, about the night he won a standing ovation from diners at the Cafe DuMonde. It was a packed house during Mardi Gras and Bowers was hustling; the cafe prides itself on rapid service, and Bowers was the fastest waiter of all.
Yet when he brought their coffee and beignets - Creole donuts - the tourists he was serving looked up at him with a "very blase" look.
"I said, `What kind of reaction is that? Here I am getting these beignets like Tarzan going through the jungle. How about a little applause?' Of course, they smiled and started applauding. I hammed it up a little. Then the next table started applauding, and the next one, and then they all stood up and I took a bow."
Somehow, Bowers segues from that story into a description of what kind of mayor he'd be - "I'm not going to be bland; I just don't believe in being a phony." And then he gives an unusual thank-you to his city: "I'm very grateful to Roanoke for allowing me to be myself as I've been involved in community life."
That dramatic flair, not simply his class politics, is what makes even some of his fellow populist Democrats on City Council blanch at the prospect of Bowers as mayor.
The same impulses that led the young waiter to ham it up at the Cafe DuMonde have led two decades later to some of Bowers' most famous - or infamous, depending on one's point of view - moments on City Council:
There was the time he tried to goad Roanoke County into merger talks by deriding the suburbs as a land of "cows grazing in the fields." Or when he crusaded to save the Hunter Viaduct, the old bridge the rest of council wanted to demolish to make way for the Dominion Tower.
Bowers portrays his exuberance as energy, vitality - qualities he says Roanoke sorely needs in its next mayor.
But Councilman James Harvey, who's backing Musser, describes Bowers differently. "It scares the life out of me the way David operates. If we had some big company looking for a site, I'm not sure David should be the guy negotiating with the company. . . . David can't be a team player unless he's the quarterback."
Harvey says he had hoped Bowers would calm down, mature, during his eight years on council. He hasn't.
Says Lee Brooks, a Roanoke businessman who knew Bowers at Patrick Henry High School: "He's the same person he was 20 years ago."
Bowers was a serious youth, with a precocious interest in politics before the '60s made activism fashionable.
On Sundays after Mass, the Bowers family always stopped by Garland's Drug Store on Grandin Road. While other kids bought sodas, Bowers plunked down his money for a Washington Post or New York Times.
By the time he was a teen-ager, Bowers was showing up at Democratic headquarters, stuffing envelopes, delivering campaign literature. "There was nobody in the Democratic Party that didn't know him," says retired educator Don Bartol, "and that's when he was in the ninth grade."
Bowers' political interests were different from those of many other kids in the '60s. "Lots of times, kids in high school are more interested in presidential candidates, because there's more glitter," says Nancy Hudgins, a high school friend who's now a lawyer in San Francisco. "But David was always interested in who was on City Council."
As a ninth-grader, Bowers announced to Bartol one day that he intended to become student body president by the time he was a senior. "I thought, `you little twerp, you're going to be nothing,' " Bartol remembers.
But Bowers put his political skills to work. He astounded his opponent - Ted Blain, a South Roanoke kid who now teaches at preppy Woodberry Forest in Orange County - by organizing a phone bank of fellow students to call classmates at home to urge a vote for Bowers.
He also persuaded Mayor Roy Webber to lend the school a voting machine, a novelty that boosted turnout and became part of the Bowers legend.
"That voting machine idea is indicative of both his imagination and his energy," Hudgins says. "How many 17-year-olds call up the mayor's office? Most people wouldn't have the gumption to do it. That's just the type of person he is."
Bowers won easily. It's a post he's so proud of that the gavel he wielded still rests on his desk. "I was the first kid from across the tracks to win," he says.
"He wears that like a badge," says Roanoke County Circuit Court Clerk Steve McGraw, who also attended PH. The astonishing thing to McGraw - who really grew up across the tracks, in blue-collar Southeast - is that Bowers was from Raleigh Court, hardly a neighborhood down on its luck.
"My impression of him in school was he was one of the elite," McGraw says, "but that was because he took a leadership role."
Bowers' outlook, however, seems colored by the precariousness of his position in the middle class. To earn money for law school, he sold inspirational-children's books from Florida to Iowa. He started practicing law on a card table because he couldn't afford a desk. His favorite watering hole, the unassuming Aesy's on Campbell Avenue, is one he got to know when his father delivered bread there years ago.
"He's always felt he was the outsider," McGraw says.
As for his high-voltage style? Bowers says studying Shakespeare and Greek tragedies in college sharpened his feel for life as theater. But it's also his fundamental philosophy.
"I'm just an activist," Bowers says. "I'm not an idealist. I'm not an ideologue. I don't believe this world can be made perfect, though we should try."
Bowers factbox
DAVID BOWERS
Age: 39.
Occupation: Lawyer.
Hometown: Born in Courtland, N.Y. Moved to Lexington, N.C., at age 4 and moved to Roanoke in 1961, at age 9.
Education: Patrick Henry High School; majored in English at Belmont Abbey in Charlotte, N.C.; Loyola University law school.
Political: Remembers volunteering for Lyndon Johnson's presidential campaign in 1964 and has been a Democratic campaign worker ever since. Organized a Teen Democrat Club in high school.
Government: Two terms on Roanoke City Council, 1984-1992.
Family: Divorced. No children. Engaged to Alison Weaver, a desktop publisher of newsletters. Wedding is in March.
Quote: "I remember what a nun told me at a young age: "When the good Lord shuts a door, he opens a window.' " In difficult moments, such as following his divorce, he used to wonder "why I couldn't get to the window. It's because I had my foot stuck in the door. I've learned to allow the door to be shut sometimes. I've learned to be more patient and accepting."
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