Eulogy - Mary Edith (Jeffers) Bowman
Mary Jeffers Bowman: August 2, 1908 - May 18, 2008
Mary Jeffers was the second of three girls born to Sam and Maggie Jeffers. Her parents were married in 1901. They lived six months in Lyons, a small farming community in Greene County, Indiana during the time it took to build, first a barn for the livestock, then the white house on the knoll that would be the Jeffers' home for the sixty-six years of their marriage. Sam and Maggie's grandparents were part of the wave of pioneers who settled south central Indiana from 1830 to 1840. Their land was originally deeded from the government in 1831. Mary's mother, remembered as a girl seeing a Shawnee family trek back from Illinois in the summer to camp on the hill that had once been their tribal land. The Shawnees left their calling card of hatchets and arrowheads that Mary and her sisters found after the spring plowing of the garden behind the house. When it became the Jeffers' farm in 1901 it was still mostly covered with timber. The barn and house were built from the oak, maple and walnut trees cleared to open the fields for crops.
The Jeffers girls and the farm thrived. Mary and her sisters attended a one-room grade school on the corner of the farm section. Mary never forgot the rich experience of that school. The Jeffers girls attended high school in Lyons, two miles north of their home. Mary loved school, was an exceptional student and the valedictorian of her 1926 graduating class. She wanted more education, but cash was in short supply in 1926. Sam bought more land in 1923 and there was a mortgage to pay. Lois, being the oldest, had first priority on spare cash for college and was sent to Indianapolis for a teacher's certificate. But the till was empty when it came Mary's turn. So she turned to Uncle Thurman.
Thurman Jeffers was Sam's younger brother. Whereas most of the Jeffers, and the community for that matter, were quite conservative, Thurman was not. He speculated with land and grain futures, drove his car too fast and maintained two households, the farm down the road with Mary's aunt and cousins and the house in Linton with "that other woman." He owned Bushrod the local granary and feed store along with the Alice-Chalmers tractor dealership in Lyons. Much to her mother's chagrin, in the summer of 1926 Mary borrowed $400 from Uncle Thurman and was off to school that fall. Thurman Jeffers frequently said it was one of his better investments.
Mary earned her teaching certificate from Indianapolis Teachers College, later to become the education school of Butler University. She returned home to begin her primary teaching career and was assigned the second grade at Lyons School in 1928.
The Vocational Agriculture teacher at Lyons was a rather dapper gentleman, ten years her senior, Starlin Ermal Bowman. S.E. was a local man from the next county, but was quite worldly by Lyons' standards. After graduating from Purdue in 1922 he and a friend drove an open Model T Ford to California. He was employed as the livestock manager on a ranch owned by a cowboy movie star. In 1923 he signed on to manage the livestock on a schooner sailing from San Francisco to Nome, Alaska, then worked there on a gold mine dredge. He later had been a traveling man selling farm chemicals in the southeastern United States. Mary's parents did not consider him prime husband material. But on October 30, 1930 Lyons School held a short morning session before the teachers departed that afternoon for the annual Teachers' Institute meeting in Indianapolis. Class pictures were taken that morning and Mary can be seen as a pretty, petite second grade teacher standing proudly behind her twenty-nine scrubbed and smiling students. She and the Agriculture teacher skipped the Institute meeting, drove to Terra Haute that afternoon, found a minister and were married.
Ned was born in April 1932 and Hal two years later during the depths of the depression. They initially lived in a small, rented bungalow in Lyons but, after Ned's birth moved to a house in the country with room for gardening and a few hogs. Medical expenses were not a problem. S.E.'s brother, Ira, was the doctor in Odon, a few miles south. Mary vividely remembered the births of her sons with Doc Ira doing the delivery assisted by his brother, both smoking cigars.
In 1936 the Bowman's moved to Poseyville in the southwestern tip of the state where S.E. was employed by the federal government as a manager at a Civilian Conservation Corp camp. Mary became a expert at moving, packing the dishes in wooden barrel filled with sawdust and loading the family possessions in a horse trailer pulled behind their 1936 Chevy. They followed the CCC camps from Poseyville to Princeton to Peru and then to Marion when the depression era camps were finally closed and S.E. was transferred to a Soil Conservation Service position. She became adept at setting up a new household, making new friends, finding a new church, and getting the boys into good schools. The boys never suffered from lack of cultural exposure. On a steamy hot afternoon in 1940 she put them on their best behavior and took them to a high school gym in Peru to listen to Fritz Kreisler play the violin.
While in Marion the war started and her life changed dramatically. S.E.'s Soil Conservation Service position required extensive use of aerial photographs to plan conservation waterways and terraces. Those talents were needed in the photo intelligence service. He was offered an officer's commission and left for duty in the summer of 1942 despite his age of 45, which was quite senior for those called to serve. After the fact Mary learned he wasn't exactly "called to serve". He volunteered for what was supposed to be temporary duty until younger men could be trained. He finally came home from the Central Pacific three years later in October 1945, two months after the war ended, - so much for the Army Air Corp's idea of temporary duty.
For Mary being a war wife was both a burden and a wonderful challenge. She was never one to dodge responsibility and overnight was converted from being a dutiful wife in a paternalistic family culture to the position of chief decision maker. In short order the boys found they were involved in non-stop programming; school, church, 4-H, Cub Scouts, movies, music lessons, plays, concerts and basketball games. Holidays and summers were spent with grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. The boys missed their father, but didn't have much time to worry about it. Mary got a job. She worked briefly as a timekeeper in a factory, then as a proofreader at a weekly newspaper, The Farm News. Later she moved to the daily paper, The Marion Chronicle, as a copywriter. She took classes in cooking, fabric arts and interior decorating and found time to serve as an officer in The Newcomers Club and The League of Women Voters.
S.E. returned from service an experienced military commander. During the same period Mary had also developed superior management skills and for a few months there was the inevitable confusion about the chain of command. Fortunately S.E. was assigned a Soil Conservation Service management position in Bloomington where they bought the small farm west of Clear Creek that kept everyone too busy to worry about command structure.
The farm was Mary's dream come true and she thrived remodeling and decoration the 1860's farmhouse with her collection of family antiques. The winter of 1946-47 was memorable in the new/old house. After living with modern conveniences for years, the family was jolted into the realities of outdoor plumbing and only a fireplace and wood stove for heat. But over the years it was modernized and graced with her decorative talents. The kitchen featured a large brick fireplace built with bricks salvaged from the one room school she attended in Greene County. She enjoyed showing guests names of her schoolmates still visibly penciled on the bricks. The floor was painted brick red, then spatter painted with yellow, green and blue dots by hitting a wet paintbrush on a stick, creating a mosaic of color and much conversation among the neighbors.
After the house became more livable, Mary returned to teaching. She first took substitute-teaching assignments, then resumed teaching primary grades full time after the boys were in high school. Concurrently she resumed her education attending evening and summer classes at IU, receiving a BS in education in 1956 and a Masters degree in 1958. She took great pleasure in seeing her second graders move through high school and college then send their children into her classroom. All her grandchildren received financial support from their grandparents in completing their university educations.
In addition to her teaching and family responsibilities she was a very active and productive community leader in Monroe County. Soon after moving to Bloomington she became annoyed by the lack of identification on the county roads and, as a member of the Home Economics Club, suggested they do something about it. The county commissioners, good politicians that they were, agreed to pay for signs if the Club could get communities to agree on the road names. After several months of hard work and negotiation the women got them all identified with the exception of a gravel road west of Clear Creek, ironically up the hill and around the corner from the Bowman farm. Everyone had always simply referred to it as that road. Anxious to complete the project, Mary informed the committee "that was That" and the county roads were named and marked.
Mary was a serious antique collector. She and S.E. both enjoyed searching out rare finds at farm auctions and antique stores and many items were added to a broad collection of heirlooms inherited from both of their families. She was a good seamstress and enjoyed spending hours at a small, black, portable Singer sewing machine that turned out quilts for the grandchildren. Her fabric arts talents were exceptional and during her many years on the Board of Directors of the Monroe County Historical Society she was considered an authority in antique fabric work. She was an avid doll collector and took pride in showing her collection which included a small German-made doll given to her at Christmas when she was six and one given to her mother by Mary's great- grandfather that Mary had repaired using her own hair.
Honey Creek School may be the community project that best represents her leadership and sense of history. She and two other teachers from the county got the idea for the project while attending a conference in Chicago in the late 1960's. One of the teachers had attended the one-room school that had been abandoned for many years. Mary had fond memories of her early education in a similar school and appreciated the historic significance of those schools to public education in Indiana. The three teachers promoted the project successfully and the school was restored with historic accuracy, including the outdoor privy. The family celebrated her 90th birthday with a picnic at Honey Creek in 1998.
To friends and family her most enduring legacy may be as a talented and gracious hostess. She enjoyed food and food preparation, flowers, tableware and good company - and she was a very skilled hostess. Hal remembers two occasions that illustrate the love reflected in that talent. The first was Thanksgiving 1958 when, he phoned to advise he and Becky would be making a quick trip home from an Air Force training base in Kansas. On short notice the base had released the students for the long holiday weekend. Casual invitations were tossed out to others in the training class to come to Indiana if they had nothing better to do. As it worked out, several didn't. By late Thursday afternoon the final count for Thanksgiving dinner at the Bowman farm was well into the twenties, Mary started another turkey in the neighbor's kitchen, delegated potato peeling chores and presented Thanksgiving dinner with seemingly casual efficiency. The fireplace roared, it snowed six inches and it was a wonderful Thanksgiving.
The second event took place much earlier, probably in 1938. The Bowman's lived in a small bungalow on South Hall Street in Princeton with The Chicago & Eastern Illinois railroad directly behind the back yard. The depression was in full maturity and hungry, jobless men wandered the railroads from town to town looking for food and work. They frequently came to the back door. The boys had been briefed when they saw a man leaving the railroad and crossing the lawn they were to come inside and lock the screen door. The men were typically thin and dirty with dark, sunken eyes. The request and response seldom varied. The hobo would stand at the foot of the wooden steps, remove his cap and politely ask for something to eat. Mary fixed a cup of tea with sugar and cream and two pieces of cinnamon/sugar toast cut diagonally and placed on each side of the cup, all with her best Jewel Tea Company China. She would ask him to step back, then unlock the screen and put the plate on the back step then relatch the door. The guest would savor the tea, doff his cap and say "thank you", then head back to the railroad.
Thank you Mary Jeffers Bowman for a wonderful, meaningful life.