BOWSHER UNIQUE – UNIT OF MEASURE FOR SINGULARITY

When I was a kid, and my mother would see my little brother and me trying to lasso each other with a jump rope, she would warn us that we should stop before we ended up “like that poor little Bowsher kid.” Everybody knew who Jim was in school, whether they actually knew him or not, because he was “the one-eyed kid,” and there weren’t all that many of his kind in town.

Jim Bowsher - Photo by Scott Bruno

Jim and I weren’t friends as kids. In fact, as I wrote in my book about him entitled The Rock Garden and Other Stories, I don’t think we ever spoke a word to each other throughout grade school, junior high or high school. That wouldn’t have been strange in a big city, but in a town of fewer than ten thousand souls, and we being only a grade apart, that sort of distance was an oddity. 

The fact is, we didn’t meet until ten years ago, when we were both in our mid-sixties. It wasn’t a chance meeting. It was carefully planned by a mutual friend, Victoria Smith, who had long insisted that Jim and I “just had to meet each other.” She more or less trapped us both into dinner at her place, without telling either of us that the other would be there. 

Well, the connection was immediate, and the two of us ended up keeping poor Vicki up until 4am, sitting at her kitchen table trying not to doze off, while Jim and I continued to drink wine and talk endlessly. When I finally glanced at my watch and said I had to go because I had a breakfast date at eight o’clock, ever-enthusiastic Jim said, “Great! So we have another four hours!”

Ever since then, we have been close friends. We’ve only grown closer over this last decade and have often regretted that we wasted so much time getting to know each other, because we could have been life-long friends from the outset. But like so many other things, that’s just life and its random nature, I guess.

Anyway, Jim once told me the story of how he had lost the eye. It hadn’t been a jump rope and he hadn’t been trying to lasso another kid. But it had indeed been with a rope with which he was trying to lasso a tree. By a quirk of fate, the end of the rope snapped him in his right eye and basically destroyed the lens.

Right to left, Larry Street, Jim Bowsher and Dan Newland
Photo by Mary Jo Knoch

Jim said he didn’t realize how bad it was until his dad got home from work and looked at the eye. He said “When I saw his expression, I knew it was bad.” Jim told me that what hurt him most wasn’t the injury, but the sadness he saw in his father’s face. He felt as if he’d somehow let his dad down and wished he could make it up to him.

The doctor who tended Jim’s wound took it on himself to explain the situation to him. It was a lot for a little boy to take in. He would, the doctor said, never see out of that eye again. The doctor looked very sad, and wanting to buck him up, the precocious little six-year-old with the big vocabulary said, “Well, I guess that’s just one more thing that will make me unique.”

Jim left us yesterday at 6pm after a long struggle with cancer. I’ve thought a lot about him lately. One of my thoughts last night after I heard the news was of what I would say if someone were to ask me what Jim was like. I came to the conclusion that the word little boy Jim had used to describe himself to the doctor was perfect. Jim, I would have to say, wasn’t like anything or anyone. Jim was unique. He was a guy with a different vision, a singular path, and the stubborn grit and optimism to forge it daily, without doubt or pause.

Anyone who has ever heard Jim’s name—and, incredibly, people have heard of him around the world—immediately associates it with his incredible Rock Garden and Temple of Tolerance. This is a work of such extraordinary size and topographical profile that an Air Force fighter pilot out of Wright Patterson Air Base in Dayton once showed up at Jim’s door after overflying it and recording the coordinates. He told Jim he just had to come and see for himself what sort of amazing thing Jim had in his backyard. That said, however, this monumental permanent art installation is merely a symbol of Jim’s real work.

According to Jim, it was first manifested in him as a vision, which only he would have had the enthusiasm and wherewithal to materialize. Jim built his monument to tolerance and its surrounding Rock Garden for children, but especially for wayward teens and pre-teens. This was to be their safe place, where violence, racism, drugs and religious intolerance were the only things not tolerated, where they could avoid the bad influences of the surrounding world, seek sanctuary from often troubled home lives and be free from bullying and lack of understanding. No matter how busy Jim was pursuing his own goals, he was always there for them. And not just in the yard, but also in society, where he coached them in baseball, spoke at their schools, accompanied many of them to juvenile court, counseled their parents and even found many of them jobs and homes as they reached the appropriate ages.

Jim involved “his” kids, encouraging them to take part in the construction of the garden and temple. He explained to them that if you built something, it became, in a sense, yours. He inspired in them a vision of the future when, as often successful adults and parents, they would return to the garden with their families and would be able to proudly say, “I helped build this.” He taught them the value of hard work, of creation, of belonging to a team, yet of being your own person, unassailable individuals capable of resisting peer pressure, and of pursuing their dreams.

In that sense, Jim was a constant mentor, and he had the good luck to live long enough to see the fruit of his gargantuan efforts to make his world a better place than he’d found it. In recent years the Rock Garden has been visited regularly by people in whose childhood lives he made a difference—a couple of generations of them, in fact. To a man and woman, they are eternally grateful for the part he played in their lives, for often pulling them back from the brink. In fact, one such man, a one-time troubled boy whose life he had changed, was with Jim’s wife, Kazuko, by his bed when he took his last breath.

That in itself could have been the sole focus of his life’s work, but it wasn’t. Jim’s boundless energy and curiosity made him a collector of people’s stories from the time he was nine, when, for the first time, he started visiting senior living facilities and interviewing the elderly, as a means of compiling the real history of our town and the surrounding area, not the one told in textbooks. He was an avid historical researcher, an expert on Wapakoneta history back to long before local native tribes had ever seen a European.

Besides getting the skinny on every major personality in our town’s history, Jim also spent a great part of his youth traveling on the cheap and seeking out the writers and other major figures that he had most admired. When Hunter S. Thompson blew his brains out in his kitchen, one of the few things pinned with magnets to his refrigerator door not to be spoiled by the blood spatter was a haiku that Jim had sent him, after having met him personally and befriended him in New York City.  He also tracked down Eudora Welty, collared her in her front yard and talked her into letting him into her home for a two-hour interview.

And then too, Jim had one of the last interviews ever recorded with Isaac Asimov. As a result, he ended up inheriting Asimov’s 1924-model manual typewriter, on which he himself would write for many years.

Jim owned Trotsky’s ink well. The story of how he got it is fascinating, but suffice it to say that he lifted it from the then-abandoned house in Mexico where the political ideologue had had his office in exile—the very office where an assassin murdered Trotsky with an ice axe. He once, too, proudly showed me a t-shirt that he’d had with him when he met Nelson Mandela in Manhattan. He had handed Mandela the t-shirt and a red marker and told him, “I’m not as interested in having your autograph as in asking you to write the one word that you think is the most important in the English language.” Without hesitation, Mandela printed “Freedom!” in huge letters on the fabric.

And these are just a few of his traveler’s anecdotes.

The Rock Garden has been visited by numerous celebrities whom Jim consistently treated with the same humanity and self-confidence that he would have any other visitor. One was Johnny Depp, who decided to go and meet Jim personally after a bitter telephone argument they had over how Depp should play his future role as John Dillinger. Jim had told a colleague of Depp’s to tell Johnny not to go making a hero out of a coldblooded killer like Dillinger, whose henchmen had murdered the sheriff in nearby Lima, Ohio when they broke the bank robber out of the county jail in the nineteen-thirties. After his visit to the Temple of Tolerance, Depp left thinking of Jim as a friend.

Nor was Jim’s social work confined to helping wayward kids. He also worked in prisons helping career criminals—including a few death-row murderers—to tell their life stories. Jim had an at times infuriating empathy with and sympathy for these men whom society had locked away. But Jim had the advantage of having collected their childhoods on paper, and while he couldn’t condone their horrific acts, he knew that in nine out of ten cases, what they’d done was the direct result of the trauma they had suffered as children.

Jim gained unsought recognition for his incredible efforts on a local, state and national level. One he could be truly proud of was his Jefferson Award. For the past fifty years, the Jefferson Award has been granted to not only renowned national figures, but also to unsung heroes whose works “have represented the good that is happening all around us, in every community across the nation.”   

Jim was an extraordinary public speaker and shared all of these stories and more with his audiences, ever seeking to help people focus on how we are all connected in the fabric of humanity, and how love and empathy are the only emotions capable of saving us.

Last November was the last time I saw Jim in person. He, some mutual friends and I had spent a lot of time together during my stay in Wapakoneta, but it was time to journey back to my home in Patagonia. That last evening, four of us, Jim, Mark Gallimore, Mary Jo Knoch and I, met at the now-iconic La Grande Pizza.

The choice was no coincidence. The building occupied by the pizzeria for the past half-century was built under contract for my grandfather in 1945, and, from 1946 until 1969, housed the Teddy Bear soda fountain and grill, a business first owned by my father and two of his brothers and later by just my father and mother. In his eclectic collection of objects with stories behind them that Jim had in his incredible museum of a house, there was a chrome and leather counter stool that had once formed part of the Teddy Bear décor. So we both—along with a couple of generations of other Wapak folks who had grown up in the forties, fifties and sixties—had an intimate connection with the place.

That night, we enjoyed excellent pizza and cold draft. We had a great time despite the fact that Jim was already visibly ill. The conversation was more nostalgic than political, remembering people and anecdotes from our formative years in this town where we had all grown up.  Eventually, however, it was time to say good-bye. Good-byes seem temporary when you’re young, but over seventy, they begin to have a permanence about them. There is a lack of certainty, a sense of hope without expectation.

Outside in the street, we all hugged each other and, for lack of anything better to say, said, “See you next time.”

When I hugged Jim, I couldn’t help noting how small he seemed. I said, “Jim, it’s been great. Hopefully, I’ll be back in a year or so.”

Jim said, “I’ll be here.”

I believed him.

Sorry you couldn’t keep that promise, my friend. But, hopeful agnostic that I am, just let me say, perhaps I’ll see you on the other side.