Bowerman and the Men of Oregon

by Kenny Moore

  Jay married Wayfe on November 3, 1914. They were a far better match, and would prove it by living a long, faithful life together in Portland and bringing up two daughters of achievement, Jane and Sally. He had, of course, sacrificed a great deal for his love. For the rest of his life he would be called “Governor” and judges and attorneys would leap to accommodate his wishes. But his career in elective office was over. He would wield remarkable influence, but it would be from behind the scenes.

  Among a broad-minded populace in a more tolerant age, mere divorce wouldn’t have destroyed a man’s ability to ask for its votes. But this was Oregon in 1913. The lessons of the wagon trains were still fresh, and they were all about morals. Having faced death many times on the Trail, the first settlers were people of tremendous religious faith who raised their families accordingly. As Barbara Bowerman would put it, “The Hoovers were all Methodists. The schools were started by the churches and set the codes for society. Divorce was considered as bad as fornication.”

  So Oregon would not forgive Jay’s breaking of faith. “Wayfe and Jay were haunted by guilt all their lives,” said Barbara, who came closest to being an objective observer and would grow to care a great deal for Wayfe Hockett Bowerman.

  Both sides of the family took the divorce hard. Long years later, a gaggle of Hoovers was dining at the University Club in Portland when the Jay Bowerman family came in. The whole Hoover family got up and left.

  Since society went easier on a clearly wronged woman, Lizzie might well have gone home, grieved, and (in the manner of her grandmother, the widow Scoggin) found a man content to bring forth calves and children. However, as they were negotiating the divorce settlement, Jay had the gall to suggest that Lizzie might be the wayward one and wondered whether the twins were even his. And then something happened to make even that wretchedness seem little more than playground babble.

  Lizzie had taken seven-year-old Dan, five-year-old Beth, and the twins to live in a Portland apartment building. Because little Tommy and Bill were well and truly into their terrible twos, Lizzie hired a nurse to help out. One morning, the nurse dressed the twins and took them for a walk. The elevator had wrought-iron accordion doors and an open grille through which passing floors were visible. When the elevator started down, Tommy’s clothes or arm got caught on something outside the car’s grating. In front of Bill and the screaming nurse, the little boy was pulled up and crushed against the edge of the compartment’s iron ceiling. He died later that day.

  As an adult, Bill Bowerman would have no memory of the accident. Nor did he seem to his aunts or uncles to have been marked by it. His wife was less convinced. “I’ve always wondered how it affected him, psychologically, seeing that,” Barbara would say in a tone that was almost academic. Yet her next words would reveal her true horror: “Can you imagine how it affected that distraught woman, whose husband was already shaming her and leaving her? I cannot!”

  Tommy’s death made Lizzie cleave to her remaining children as few mothers have. She snatched them up, went back to Fossil, and, everlastingly embittered by abandonment and loss, raised them without the help of a man ever again.

  The two-year-old Bill was imprinted with his mother’s judgment. If his father had just kept his promise and taken care of his family, the accident would never have happened. Bill’s twin, little Tommy, would have been alive to play with, to grow up with. On some deep, emotional level, Bill Bowerman may well have believed his father a murderer.

  Barbara mused upon all these things for years and developed a theory. “Bill’s inner conflict, wherever it came from, had to do with being uneasy about being a man. Like his whole family on his mother’s side, he was ashamed of his father. As he grew and began to be prideful about his own manliness, it ran right into his mother’s hatred of that very thing. She taught him that you beware of men. All men. They’ll betray you. Maybe he became ashamed of his own masculinity. Bill never even spoke about it until after we got married—the divorce or his dying twin or his mother’s trauma, or even that his father had just been governor when it all happened. Of course he was too young to remember any of it. But also, it was something you didn’t discuss in that family. Talk about your deep, dark secret.”

  Lizzie was thirty-five and would earn her living by teaching. For that, she had to go back to Oregon State for her master’s degree. Leaving the kids in Fossil with her younger sister, Maud, who’d married Weaver Edwards, she enrolled in Corvallis in late 1914. The Edwardses had no children of their own and Maud doted on Bill, but however splendidly her children were being cared for, Lizzie could not endure being apart from them.

  So she soon brought them all to her. Her brother Will loaned Lizzie his own daughter to help out. “I was seventeen and I babysat the kids while Lizzie went to college,” Dot Hoover Miller recalled many years later. “And then I went to Corvallis High School. I had a lot of fun. But Aunt Lizzie hated men. She hated men. She’d turned against them, every single one. Later, she’d never let Beth have a boyfriend. Poor Beth. She could have had a life, but she always had to live with her mother.”

  Lizzie—who exempted male family and friends from her disdain—wouldn’t leave her kids, not then, not ever. If one child needed to go somewhere, the whole family went. She taught school in Fossil until Dan was in high school, then moved the family to Ashland because the schools offered a wider choice of subjects. They would go on to Seattle so Dan could attend the University of Washington’s Journalism School, to Medford for Dan’s first newspaper job, and to Eugene, so Bill could graduate from the University of Oregon while still living with his mother.

  But that was far in the future. First, Lizzie took her master’s in home economics in 1916 and the family returned to Fossil. Bill was five. Lizzie’s brother Will had taken over the original ranch and other siblings had homes and families nearby. Lizzie and her kids lived in those houses, among those myriad relations, and young Bill started school. On his first day of first grade, the teacher asked, “Can you write your name?” Bill cried, “That’s what I came here to learn!”—an early warning that he meant to go through life on his own terms.

  CHAPTER 3

  Wild Bill Meets a Mule Skinner

  DURING HIS EARLY CHILDHOOD, BILL’S LIFE CENTERED ON THE HOMESTEADS. All the families had houses in town, where the mothers lived with their kids during school. Come summer they’d move out and work on the ranches, setting up big tents for the overflow.

  “When we returned, years later,” Barbara Bowerman would recall, “Bill’s Fossil wasn’t the little town. It was the original ranch of his grandparents’ on Hoover Creek, eight miles away, where he carried water to the hay crews with a mule and slept under the stars.”

  At times, the boy Bill ran wild among the lava-topped buttes and pinewoods, as rebellious as only a fatherless child can be. Driving through the area in later years, Bowerman would point out to visitors some cramped little cave he’d spent the night in after running away from home. There were a lot of those caves. He seemed to imply that he was so fired by his own wild yearnings, so temper torn, that obedience had been impossible. But make the slightest suggestion that he might’ve been an unhappy child and he’d narrow his eyes and say, “Just the opposite.” He didn’t flee because he was miserable. He ran because he could get away with it.

  Fossil has changed so little that one may stroll up Main, pass the Mercantile general store, its exterior unaltered, and retrace Bill’s footsteps. After exploding from his fourth-grade classroom and the stucco grade school, he played workup with kids from the large Kelsey and Steiwer families on the weedy softball field that abuts the thirty-degree hillside at the town’s eastern boundary. Behind the backstop, he worked beige claystone rocks from the crumbling gumbo and whacked them open to reveal 10,000-year-old leaves and ferns. People still do. This is the only Oregon fossil bed where one may remove specimens. (The hill is huge and has yielded only leaves—so far.)

  Bill, born ravenous, would have bolted at the faintest call to dinn
er and raced down the hill. He’d have whooped past Uncle Will’s white frame house on Main Street and skidded into the yard of whichever Hoover place Lizzie and her kids were occupying that year. Bill’s appetite was mythic. Decades later, writing for the Wheeler County History magazine, Bill’s son Jon told a story about his dad. “When Lizzie’s children were small,” Jon wrote, “some friends had gone to the Columbia River and speared a bunch of salmon. They had several on the table for Sunday dinner and while heads were bowed to say Grace, Bill stood up in his chair with a knife and interrupted the prayer by announcing, ‘I’m gonna spear me a salmon.’” The reaction from the grownups was not surprising. “It was some time before young Bill could sit with his full weight let down,” Jon wrote, but his fascination with impaling a big fish was undiminished. A few days later Bill called from in front of the house for his mother to come watch him spear a salmon. “Lizzie was busy inside,” Jon wrote, “but her son was so insistent that she finally went out and found him teasing a rattlesnake with a willow branch.”

  On Sundays, Lizzie required Methodist rear ends to be on hard, oak Methodist pews. Bill would be squirming by the doxology, but leaped to add his voice to hymns. He attended well enough to the sermon if the preacher used a few barnyard similes. But readings from the King James Bible, when the strange power of the Psalms and Prophets poured over the congregation, left him openmouthed with awe.

  Patience for the young Bill’s pranks ran deep. Fossil knew what Jay Bowerman had done to Lizzie and her children. It was hardly compensation for the ache of being fatherless, but the community spread a safety net under the three Bowerman kids. Lizzie had unlimited support in the hard things, the life and death things, so wild little Bill’s antics were accorded some rolling of the eyes and clucking when a child of their own might have gotten the strap. “I was a shirttail cousin to everybody in that town,” Bill often said with an amazement that never seemed to fade. He had no father, but he had a family. He had a huge family. He had a town of his own, eight blocks square.

  Not that his grandmother cut him any slack. Bill knew her as an amazingly strong and observant woman. When he was eleven and Mary Jane Hoover was seventy-six, she asked him where he was going with that gunnysack.

  “To pick apples with Ed,” said Bill, ducking and trying for the door.

  Knowing that not one tree in the neighborhood was ripe, Mary Jane acted, as we’ve come to say, preemptively. When Bill’s partner in green apple theft, Ed Kelsey (who would one day be county sheriff), peeked in the window, there was Bill trussed to a kitchen chair with dishtowels. “That little bit of a woman hogtied me!” Bowerman would recall proudly.

  His mother was tough, too. One story passed down through the family told of Lizzie and the kids traveling by stagecoach from Fossil to Condon one winter. The stage was late due to heavy snow so, on a ridge called the Devil’s Backbone, where the wind had swept the road clean, the driver tried to make up time despite a drop-off on one side. The frightened kids began screaming. The driver shouted down from the box, “Shut those goddamn kids up, they’re spooking my horses.” Lizzie hollered back at him, “Slow down those goddamn horses, they’re scaring my kids!” As Jon Bowerman would write, “Lizzie could sit at a table with heads of state and diplomats and know which fork to use and how to talk to whom. But she could just as easily put a recalcitrant teamster in his place. She raised her kids the same way.”

  Wherever Lizzie and the children lived after their years in Fossil, they came back for the summer harvests. Throughout high school and college, Bill leapt at every chance to return. It wasn’t that he romanticized farming. “A horse to him was hard, hot work,” Barbara would say. “Bill had to pitch hay, and underneath those stacks they would find four or five rattlesnakes, so they kept their boots on. It was hot in summertime. But he gloried in that. The harvest was communal, the people going from one ranch to another, and he loved telling of the amounts of food, served ‘promptly’ at noon. When the whistle blew, crews came in, washed their faces in horse troughs and sat down to huge meals. Whenever, in later life, I placed before him a plate of food that seemed too much, he’d say, ‘Trying to feed me like a hay crew?’”

  Gradually the hard life of Fossil would turn Mary Jane Hoover into the image of Abe Lincoln. But it took eighty-nine years to kill her. She would live until 1934, when Bill was a year out of college. Indeed, Bowerman was reared by such strong women that one can search for a dynamic man in the mix and find none to compare. His favorite uncle was Will Hoover, who managed both the ranch and the Mercantile general store. But Will was more benefactor than disciplinarian. According to Mary Jane’s great-granddaughter, Georgia Lee Hoover Stiles, “All Tom and Mary Jane’s children went to college except the first, Will. He became the solid rock you hear about that looked after his widowed mother, trying to keep the ranch going and providing aid and comfort to his sisters and their children. You will be surprised how many lives he touched and how many today carry Will’s first name through the generations, whether their last names are Steiwer, Bowerman, or Hoover.”

  Tom and Mary Jane had only two sons, Tom and Will, so the family tree is hung with Williams and Toms, Toms and Williams, twig after twig, limb after limb. Some Chambers/Hoover/Bowerman qualities come down the generations with eerie exactitude. Bill’s three sons all fix the world with their grandfather’s voracious gaze. Hold a photo of Lizzie at twenty next to Jon’s elder daughter, also named Elizabeth, and people will swear they’re not looking at resemblance but identity. There is that yearning gene that causes, when adolescence attacks, a fury to flee.

  These are eccentricities, oddities that run through every clan. If the family serves as an object lesson, it is in its ability to jerk on its boots and buck 100-pound hay bales or break a bronc and then take a bath and make a beef bourguignonne and play the banjo and read a book and clean a fossil and teach the kids to do the same. To attain that Jeffersonian range is not just to be heir to Mary Jane and her grand piano. It is to prove that there is no necessary center of the world, no real need for New York or London or Paris. The great concepts, the logic, the math, the observations, the poetry, can be made to advance anywhere. A Nobel chemist can grow up in Condon. The ranch life of Fossil taught its children to close off no options, to presume nothing impossible.

  Lizzie and Mary Jane formed Bill’s lens on the world for his first twelve years. So as the character of the man who would mold so many other characters began to take shape, it included, as Barbara would note, a certain feminine indirection. Although he grew to look the part, Bowerman would never be a classic, macho, frontally attacking man’s man. In his approach to the world he would take stock, give nothing away, circle to different vantage points, and keep an eye out for a sign of something he might exploit. But as a youngster, Bill was still so feral that before he could contribute anything to humanity, he would need to join the species. That humanizing would have to take place elsewhere—and with the help of a man, thank you very much.

  As Bill finished sixth grade, his brother Dan graduated from Ashland High and headed to the University of Washington. Lizzie had planned to move the whole family to Seattle, but was offered a job in a Portland hospital. She agonized over the decision. Taking the job would mean having to split up her brood. But she wanted to put her own talents and education to work and, besides, they needed the money. So she accepted the post, fiercely hugged Dan good-bye, and looked around Portland for a school to tame her willful youngest.

  Thus it was that Bill—“this free, hayseed, babied, coddled child,” as Barbara would describe him—spent seventh grade in Hill Military Academy. Bill’s ambivalence toward the military dated from that year. A photo shows him in uniform there, combed, polished, ramrod straight, with a face that repudiates it all. He hated it.

  Bill shared this with his mother. Lizzie, acting on what her whole being urged her to do anyway, reunified her kids, packing up Bill and Beth and joining Dan in Seattle, where Bill completed eighth grade. He’d now had to win ne
w respect three years in a row, in Ashland, Portland, and Seattle.

  And they weren’t settled yet. By 1925, Dan was chafing. Vibrant with the impatience of all young Bowermans, he felt perfectly able to run a small newspaper. Yes, he was two years from a degree, but Lizzie believed him. They headed to the southern Oregon town of Medford, just a few miles from their previous home in Ashland, because Lizzie had spied an opportunity. Her work and frugality had let her hoard Jay’s divorce settlement and alimony, and with it she bought a freshly launched Medford newspaper, the Daily News. Dan started right in as reporter and city editor. Bill, now fourteen, learned to help his brother in the production department.

  Bill and Beth entered Medford High as a freshman and a senior, respectively. Bill was soon observed in playground battles. Beth had an equally familiar problem. Lizzie still allowed her no boyfriends and watched her with the relentlessness of the permanently charred. Beth dutifully trudged straight home every day and studied for hours, transferring whatever burgeoning desires she may have had into emulating her teachers. Four years later, she would graduate Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Oregon in education and go on to embody Lizzie’s belief about how a woman’s life ought to be conducted. She would teach and help others rear children, but she would have no truck with the deceiving-seducing gender. Years later Barbara Bowerman would liken Beth to a once-juicy grape, drying into a raisin.

  All three Bowerman children revered their mother. She was all they had, especially during the years after leaving Fossil. The older two each found a way to honor Lizzie’s wishes, albeit, in Beth’s case, at some cost. Not so Bill.