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When I arrived at Arkansas Business in August 1999, I really didn’t know any business leaders in Arkansas. I was born and raised in Arkansas, and I had been a local government reporter in Pine Bluff and an education reporter for the old Arkansas Gazette. But the only business reporting I had done was in Nashville, Tennessee, so even business legends like William H. Bowen were new to me.
That fall, as Y2K loomed, I was charged with producing a “special publication” that we called Arkansas Business 2000. It was a forgettable effort in many ways, but it gave me the opportunity to meet and interview Mr. Bowen. He was 76 then and retired but still maintaining office hours at Regions Bank, which had acquired his First Commercial Corp. at four times book value the previous year.
He told me on that first meeting that he got irritated every time he drove past what he still called Robinson Auditorium. He blamed Joseph T. Robinson, Depression-era U.S. senator, for listening to Arkansas Power & Light founder Harvey Couch and turning down President Franklin Roosevelt’s offer to put federally subsidized hydroelectric power on the Arkansas River — the project that eventually became the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Mr. Bowen was a product of the Great Depression, born to a relatively prosperous family in the Jefferson County farming community of Altheimer in 1923. He was on the young end of “the Greatest Generation.” He completed the Navy’s fighter pilot training and was disappointed when World War II ended in 1945 because he had not had the chance to fly a single mission.
“I’m careful to whom I tell that, because the horror of war is such that if I’d had any sense, I wouldn’t say that,” he told me in that 1999 interview. “But I’d lost a brother, and I’d worked hard for two years to be trained for it.”
His older brother, John, had been swept out to sea in October 1942, and before Christmas of that year his brother Pat would die from a ruptured appendix. It’s no wonder that Bill Bowen grabbed life with both hands.
After that first interview, Mr. Bowen added me to his lunch rotation. Two or three times a year for almost a decade, he would call and invite me to lunch at the Little Rock Club at the top of the Regions Building. Those lunches are truly one of the great privileges of my time as editor of Arkansas Business.
Of course, by then Mr. Bowen wasn’t trying any cases or doing any bank deals or helping Bill Clinton get elected. He wasn’t the subject of news stories, except when he donated enough money to get his name on the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s law school. My experience with him was as an aging titan with great stories and jokes that I — unlike, I’m sure, most of the people in his life — had not yet heard a million times.
Every time we met, he would ask me how old I was — 38, 40, 45 — and would exclaim, “I’ve got suits older than you!”
Mr. Bowen’s death last week was no surprise. He was 91, after all, and had been in declining health for several years. When I last saw him in March — having lunch with his daughter at Forty-Two, the restaurant at the Clinton Presidential Library — I thought it might well be the last time we would meet.
I thought of him on election night this month, when Republicans won their largest majorities in both houses of Congress in nearly a century. I had met Mr. Bowen for lunch on Nov. 8, 2006 — the day after the second midterm election of President George W. Bush’s administration, when Mr. Bowen’s Democrats had enjoyed a similar sweep.
We went through the buffet line at the Little Rock Club, but he barely touched his food. I asked if he was unwell.
“Hung over,” he smiled.
He had watched the election returns with friends, and the celebration had included too many adult beverages. “And with every drink,” he said, “my net worth and IQ just kept getting bigger.”
***
William H. Bowen’s 2006 autobiography, “The Boy From Altheimer,” is worth a read. I carried my copy around in my car for more than a year before I finally got him to sign it for me.
Email Gwen Moritz at GMoritz@ABPG.com.
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