Hero Worship

Augustus Theodore Bowen was born a scant two months after Lee surrendered at Appamatox.  The oldest son of Elijah and Martha Bowen lived his entire life in Maryland.  He married Kate Caldwell and fathered a dozen children.  Some of the family archives say there were 13 children.  Those of us investigating the lineage have only been able to account for 12. 

He buried four of those children before they reached age two.  Like his father before him,  Gus, as he was known,  worked for the Roland Park Company.  They were developers  in Roland Park, which became part of Baltimore City after annexation in the late 1800's.  Roland Park boasted a Country Club, including a golf course and stables.

Pap worked in the stables with the horses and the mules.  He  was part of the crew that laid the roadway on Roland Avenue and again on Falls Road in the Hampden section of Baltimore.  According to my grandmother, his daughter Mary Elizabeth, he worked until he was  eighty years old.  I was told that one day representatives of the Roland Park Company brought Pap home in a company car.  He was in tears.  They told my grandmother as kindly as they could, that Pap had worked long enough.

My first memory of Pap was the man in the blue sweater, denim shirt and brown fedora sitting on my grandmother's front porch.   He always seemed to be  there when our car pulled up in front of the house.  He had white hair, what was left of it, and a white moustache.  Previously, when it was fashionable, this was a handlbar moustache.  ( I would certainly have liked to have known him back in the day!)  He must have been quite the man!

 There was a pipe and a can of Prince Albert on the table beside the  green glider.  Sometimes the bag of Red Man chewing tobacco made its appearance also.  On those days,  a rather disreputable Van de Camps baked bean can materialized.  I soon came to know its purpose and noticed the exchange when my grandmother swapped it out for a clean one.

Like a sentinel, he manned his post on the glider every day from the first blush of spring until the chill of autumn sent him indoors.  As I grew old enough to play on the sidewalk in front of the Baltimore rowhouse, he took over monitoring my welfare and behavior.  He also, without knowing it, undertook some of my earliest education.

If  no neighborhood children were available to build forts in the backyard, or dress the Fox Terrier in baby clothes and attempt to push her down the street in the pram,  Pap was recruited to keep me occupied and out of trouble.  This he did by spinning tales of the "old white houseon the hill" filled with animals.  We had Puppy, Kitty, Booby (the owl) and Mousie and Polly.    He had a white horse and I had a black and white pony.  There were cud chewing cows ( which he demonstrated until I fell over with laughter) calves, a donkey  and rambunctious and ornery cowboys.

When the chores of the farm were done, we rode our horses down the hill to the Picnic. That is where they had rides and entertainment behind the white fence.  Occasionally,  we were accompanied by the cowboys. They always got into trouble at the Picnic.  Then, the sheriff was summoned to quell the disturbance.  The cowboys always wound up incarcerated in the city jail.  Sometimes, when they had been particularly unruly, the sheriff would turn the water on and they were showered in their cell.  

On other occasions, we went for walks together.  He wore his fedora and carried his "stick" as he called it.  Arthritis had rendered him bent and slow but had not yet stopped him.  It was not unusual to see the once robust man and the short, chubby, blonde child walk the four blocks to the Wyman Park ballfield on Beech Avenue.  We had dubbed this "the old wire fence".  We spent many summer mornings watching the morning glories on the chain link backstop behind home plate open to meet the sun.

He mystified me with the  feats he could perform seemingly at will.  He always carried a pocket knife.  The purpose of this eluded me until the day that the boy down the street, my secret crush at age 5, named Billy,  decided he wanted to play cowboys with his friend Leonard.  No girls were allowed.  HUMPH!

I was desolate.  My tears were unstoppable and my  moans and wails threatened to wake my grandfather. He worked the graveyard shift at Black and Decker and slept during the day.  Waking grandaddy in the middle of the day would not bode well for my enjoyment of the afternoon.

Pap took me by the hand and led me sobbing into the house.  He produced an apple from the refrigerator and the knife from his pocket.  He admonished me to keep my eyes on him as he made a slice at the stem end of the apple and began to peel the shiny red and yellow orb. 

I was astonished!  My tears dried as I watched  in amazement as the red stripe of skin began to get longer and longer as the apple turned whiter and whiter.  In a minute, the apple was denuded and the single, intact, perfect piece of red skin lay curled like a snake at his feet.

Well, that definitely changed my outlook on the day.  Who needed Billy?   Bet me Billy could not have performed this feat of legerdemain. I had Pap.  Who needed Billy?