Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 8, 1993 TAG: 9303080055
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ABINGDON LENGTH: Long
HIS COLUMNS SUPPORTED A CAREER
Lowry Bowman, who spent more than 20 years doing a weekly column for the Washington County News, has spun off some of that material into a book titled "Confessions of a Dark-Barker."The title comes from the idea that dogs bark at night because they believe, by so doing, they eventually can drive away the darkness. Because morning always comes, they feel proven correct.
Bowman, 67, likens column-writing to this instinct in humans.
"Confessions," which is self-published, is not just a recycling of columns Bowman wrote from 1966 to 1989. Much of the material is new, reflective, and puts the selected columns into perspective.
The columns deal with such basics as life and death, religion ("As the son of a Presbyterian minister, I grew up with a conviction of guilt although I was never precisely sure why," Bowman writes), and writing for a living, all leavened by a dry and gentle wit.
They also touch on temporary issues that raged during Bowman's tenure as a small-town editor, such as dirty books, whether coon hunters drink, and Oliver North's activities likened to the old Robert Culp-Bill Cosby "I Spy" TV series - an editorial for which he was roundly criticized at the time. Bowman makes the point that many once-hot issues seem to cool in retrospect.
He also manages to give the reader new insights from his own perspective into the civil rights movement, dealing with Lyndon Johnson when he was president, and newswriting in general.
"People who write stuff for newspapers (and this is a safe generalization) basically are insecure people. They are not altogether sure that theirs is an honorable profession, and they know well that their stuff is not literature," he writes.
Bowman spent 15 years with a wire service, writing for newspapers from state capitals across the country and from Washington, D.C. On reflection, he admits he was still pretty naive in the fall of 1965 when he quit to buy a nearly bankrupt paper that previously was run by an editor-reporter-photographer and an owner-publisher who hated each other.
"It was disillusioning to discover that while we claimed to be selling 6,000 copies of the Washington County News each week, we were only printing 3,000 copies and heavily burdening the town's garbage truck with those left unsold," he recalls.
Soon, the other owner left town, taking with him the newspaper's attractive typesetter and its only company car. That was when he first tried to sell advertising.
"I could not sell weapons to Libyan terrorists," he concluded.
His wife, Elizabeth, became the advertising saleswoman, learning the job by doing it. "It was the start of a working partnership that taught me humility and gratitude, and I have written about her teasingly but with great admiration over the years."
She died in 1988. Bowman dedicated the book to her - or, to "The Girl in Blue Velvet," which was what she was wearing when they first met and, after a few stumbles, began what became a lifelong romance that is also covered in one of those columns.
The void left by her death is one reason Bowman busied himself with the book project, after writing his last column at the end of 1989 and then selling the paper. That column also ends the book.
But the book provokes more laughs than tears, chronicling life in Washington County and filled with stories ranging from how modernizing Abingdon's post office ruined one of Bowman's major news sources to how his plans to raise a pig for slaughter went awry when the hog turned into a Frankenstein's monster.
He is at his funniest when taking jabs at his own profession, including why he chose to write his own columns all those years: "Most weekly newspapers, as well as many dailies, do the disgraceful thing. They buy canned editorials from other publications. This is the moral equivalent of using someone else's toothbrush. Nice people don't do it."
He agrees with nationally syndicated columnist Joe Murray, who runs a small newspaper in Lufkin, Texas: "Our capability to report news has outstripped our ability to make news." And he notes how the telephone has changed the nature of journalism from a time when hordes of reporters prowled the streets in search of news.
"These reporters, at least in most cases, actually saw the events they were reporting. Invention of the telephone made this huge work force unnecessary. Reporters now sit at their desks and talk over the telephone to strangers who have seen something."
Bowman might never admit it while puncturing press platitudes, but what also emerges from the book is a respect for newspapers as being able to tell stories on a day-to-day basis - ranging from the Civil War to Watergate in his examples - in a way historians could never do.
Once, he was upbraided in public by a reader who canceled his subscription because of a column. Later, and just as publicly, the ex-reader announced to Bowman that the piece had no doubt been written in ignorance and he was now willing to renew.
No, Bowman told him, he could no longer buy the paper at any price. If he wanted to read it, he would have to go to the library and check it out.
"Could a big-city paper get away with something like that?" Bowman asks in the book. "I don't think so."