Home in the Country

During 15 years with the United Press International, Lowry Bowman reported his share of major news events--from the first manned U.S. rocket shots to the long, wearying travels of presidential campaigns. Later, as a $10,000-a-year rewrite man on the general-news desk of U.P.I.'s Washington bureau, he handled the nation's top political stories with speed and accuracy. A promotion was in the works; he was successful and progressing in his chosen profession.

Yet Lowry Bowman was seething with discontent. Rewriting other people's stories rewarded him with continual frustration; the repetitious 11 a.m.-to-7 p.m. routine bored him. Though he lived in a comfortable apartment in suburban Silver Spring, Md., it irked him that his kids "were growing up playing in a parking lot--imagine that, a parking lot!"

Time to Go. Bowman began to dream. And his was a dream familiar to newsmen everywhere: he would buy himself a small-town newspaper and become a country editor, writing whatever he pleased and raising his family in a pure, pastoral setting. Unlike so many of his colleagues, though, Bowman was determined to turn his dream into reality. In 1960, he went into debt to buy an abandoned 67-acre farm in Washington County, Va., an area known for antique shops and country hams, hurley tobacco and beef cattle, spoon bread and purple, mist-hung hills. Five years later, at the age of 39, he decided "it was now or never." He quit U.P.I., moved his wife and three children to the farm, and took a job writing editorials for the Bristol (Va.) Herald-Courier, the nearest daily paper. A few months later, he learned that some stock was for sale in the Washington County News, the county's leading weekly (circ. 4,000), founded in 1948 by the son of Author Sherwood Anderson. Bowman eagerly went deeper into debt to pick up a 23% interest, and last January he took over as editor.

The title is a vast understatement. Bowman is also the paper's only staff reporter and photographer; he writes a signed column as well as the editorials, even helps distribute the twelve-page publication by car. He works twelve to 15 hours a day, seven days a week, has stopped playing bridge on Saturday nights because "now I wouldn't dream of killing that much time." His family pitches in with wrapping and labeling, and Daughter Elizabeth, 10, has been enlisted to review local children's plays under her own byline.

Time to Be Cantankerous. So far, Bowman's editorials (on such subjects as local taxes and the school system) have been consistently cautious. "I haven't figured out yet just who the ungodly are around here," he says. "I have plenty of time in which to become cantankerous." Meanwhile, he fills the paper with his own handsome pictures of rustic Washington County scenes--meadows, old mills, derelict wagons--and reaches back into history to print county records from the 1700s. His column is his special joy, and he manages to make it personal and folksy without being corny.

Everything is grist. He writes of his wife's encounter with poison ivy or of his own desperate search for the family cat during a blizzard; he tells how to talk on the party line without revealing secrets to eavesdroppers, devotes a whole page of sensitive text and pictures to the juvenile joy of playing in a hay-filled barn. Bowman prefers to think of himself as "a sort of would-be farmer with typewriter."

The paper's profits, to be sure, are marginal. But the new editor hopes they will grow along with circulation: "It could be 10,000--there are 10,000 families in the county." To supplement his income, he works the farm by himself, has already made $700 on such crops as corn and tobacco, and expects the figure to climb soon to $2,500 a year.

Look Who's Laughing. Quite obviously, Bowman figures he has it made. And it is equally obvious that his pals in Washington figure he has made a bad bargain. They told him, he reported in one of his columns: "You are burying yourself in the wilderness. What will you do for entertainment? Who will you talk with about Viet Nam?" His answers were refreshingly direct. "Gentle reader, I haven't found time enough even to think about such things. Who do I talk with about Viet Nam? The boys who have been there and have come home; the people who have a son or a brother in Viet Nam and know more about what it really means than those who feed on press releases from the Pentagon. The Pentagon doesn't have a brother."

One of the first things Bowman did when he took over the paper was to start sending it to his old friends back at the U.P.I, office in Washington. "I bet they get a laugh out of my covering a sheep-shearing demonstration, but then I chuckle at them--look at what they're doing." As for the future, the headline on Bowman's first editorial still holds: HOME FOR GOOD.

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