Record details
-
-
Throughout my life, even as a young boy growing up in the Angelina County sawmill town of Diboll, I wanted to be a writer.
My father, Weldon Bowman, a sawmill mechanic for Southern Pine Lumber Company, recognized my desire and bought a second-hand typewriter for me. I banged away at its keys until I wore them into scrap metal.
In 1953, as I sat in the study hall at Diboll High School, my high school principal, Robert Ramsey, tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Bobby Neil, I need to see you in my office.”
Wondering what I had done, I meekly followed Mr. Ramsey into his office and slumped into a chair.
“Bobby Neil,” he said, “we need someone to cover the high school ball games, type them up and send them to the newspaper.”
“Mr. Ramsey,” I protested, “I can’t write and I can’t type.” Ramsey responded: “Well, Mrs. Schinke, your English teacher, says you’re a good writer, and Dixie Cook will teach you how to type.”
There was another teacher on the Diboll campus who would later influence my life. She was Blanche Prejean—the wife of Buck Prejean, football coach at Lufkin High School. She apparently also saw some potential in the skinny kid in her journalism classes.
When the Prejeans moved to Tyler, Mrs. Prejean landed a job teaching journalism at Tyler Junior College. When I graduated at Diboll, I followed her to TJC and she started shaping my career as a writer and author.
She helped me find a job at the Tyler Courier Times-Telegraph. I worked at night and attended her classes at TJC during the day. She even located a room for me in a decent boarding house a block from the Courier-Times-Telegraph.
But it was TJC where I blossomed with my exposure to campus life, a variety of other subjects, the availability of a cadre of wise and understanding teachers, a library filled with thousands of books, and new friends from all over Texas.
The knowledge I absorbed at TJC equipped me in the coming years with the ability to write a history and folklore column, “Bob Bowman’s East Texas,” that has been picked up by more than ninety weekly and daily newspapers in East Texas.
When I married Doris Shaddock of Lufkin in 1958, we found that we had a remarkable affinity for the same things. Doris and I also developed an affinity for working with organizations which serve Texas history, the humanities, the arts and other community needs. Together, we founded Bob Bowman & Associates, Inc. in 1985 in Lufkin, followed by Best of East Texas Publishers, which serves authors throughout Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma. We have produced more than 50 books about East Texas with seven others currently in the works.
Doris and I have been married 53 years and have two sons, Neil, 52, and Jimmy, 49, as well as two grandsons, Scott and Matthew Bowman.
I know I’m not unique in how Tyler Junior College changed my life. I’m sure that countless numbers of young people enriched their lives from the knowledge they carried away from TJC and were helped to discover who and what they might become.
That’s why I am proudest of a plaque hanging on my office wall in Lufkin, designating me as TJC’s outstanding graduate during its 60th year of service.
Looking back, TJC remains closer to my heart than any group I have worked with.
- Biography
- TJC Hero and Friend Bob Bowman, together with his wife of 53 years, Doris, have been involved in organizations throughout East Texas. They both served as chairs of the Texas Council for the Humanities, and Bob served on the Texas Historical Commission, as president of the East Texas Historical Association, member of the Texas Centennial Commission and Texas Sesquicentennial Commission, member of the Texas Capital Centennial Commission, chairman of the board at Angelina College and president of the Angelina Chamber of Commerce. Professionally, Bob has worked for the Diboll Free-Press, the Lufkin Daily News, the Houston Chronicle, and the Tyler Courier-Times-Telegraph, as well as several other corporations, including Delta Drilling Company and Southland Paper Mills, Inc. The work by Bob Bowman & Associates has been honored with the National Cleo Award for a special ad campaign and numerous awards from the East Texas Addy Association. In 2011, Discover Magazine of Jacksonville named Bob Bowman as “Mr. East Texas” in recognition of his work on behalf of the region. In addition to his regular column, Bob Bowman’s East Texas - which appears in more than 90 Texas newspapers - Bob has written 18 books about Texas history and lore. For a list of works, visit www.bob-bowman.com.
