Zack Rhollie Bowen, II's Obituary
Bowen,Zack R.75,headed UM's English Department for decade
BY ELINOR J. BRECHER
[email protected]
Zack R. Bowen, a popular University of Miami James Joyce scholar who headed the English Department for a decade and co-founded UM's Caribbean Writers Summer Institute, died April 8 of complications from Alzheimer's disease. He was 75.
He leaves six children, wife Lindsey Tucker Bowen -- also a UM English professor -- and an internationally-respected academic legacy.
It includes dozens of publications, and a 1960-era series of Ulysses dramatic readings for Folkways Records, which he produced and directed. The Smithsonian Institution reissued the collection in 1993.
An authority on the role of music in Joyce's work, Bowen was past president of the New York-based James Joyce Society and the International James Joyce Foundation, and trustee of the latter.
In 1991, as department chairman, Bowen used part of a $1 million gift to the UM English department by novelist James Michener to launch the five-year Summer Institute, which evolved into the Caribbean Literary Studies Program.
Earthy, exuberant and endlessly amused by Joyce's descriptions of rude bodily functions, Bowen was a larger-than-life presence who stood 6-foot-3 and topped out near 400 pounds.
Like Joyce, he was an accomplished tenor who integrated a love of music into all aspects of his life. He played piano and guitar, and sang professionally in churches.
Joyce celebrates the joy of life often through music which knows no boundaries,' said A. Nicholas Fargnoli, Joyce Society president. Zack was the voice of happiness, and Joyce probably resonated in him. . .He was the most well-liked of all Joyceans.'
NAUGHTY TUNES
Bowen -- who once ``turned the sound of flatulence into music' during a bookstore reading, according to Fargnoli -- delighted in entertaining UM audiences with naughty song parodies that he and friends wrote.
But he was his own best joke, so after one performance during a dieting phase, Bowen laughed along with the audience when his pants fell down.
``He was the most entertaining academic I've ever known,' said fellow UM English professor Patrick McCarthy, a friend since the 1970s.
``His favorite character was [Shakespeare's] Falstaff -- and he was Falstaffian. He had a funny way of talking about his weight: `I lost 100 pounds and nobody noticed.' '
RETIREMENT
Five years ago, Bowen's memory began to slip, said McCarthy, a fellow Joyce scholar. Bowen realized what was happening and retired.
Soon after, he sold his fishing boat and cherished vacation homes in Islamorada and Martha's Vineyard, and quit playing poker with the boys.
After falling in late 2008, Bowen moved to Kendall's Heartland Health Care Center, where he died.
A one-time used car salesman, Bowen never lost his appetite for schmoozing, wheeling and dealing.
Nothing would please him more than one of his buddies buying a car,' said son Zack R. Bowen Jr. He'd string these negotiations out for four, five days. . . He loved it.'
Bowen spent years plotting to join the UM faculty so that he could fish year-round, his son said. He taught at the University of Delaware, the State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton, State University College at Fredonia and Temple University, before landing the UM department chairmanship in 1986. ``We'd schedule a vacation in South Florida and he'd line up speaking engagements all the way down so [his] university would pay for it,' Zack Jr. said.
Zack Rhollie Bowen was born Aug. 10, 1934 in Philadelphia, of Welsh ancestry on his opera-singing mother's side, the descendant of pre-Atlanta plantation owners on his father's.
His first marriage, to the former Patricia Lingsch, ended in 1980.
Bowen earned a bachelor's degree in business from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, a master's from Temple, and a doctorate from SUNY Buffalo, which he described as ``a major Joyce manuscript repository.'
The SUNY Press published his thesis Musical Allusions in the Works of James Joyce: Early Poetry Through Ulysses in 1974.
LOVE OF JOYCE
In a 2001 speech to the Joyce Society, Bowen explained how a Temple professor researching songs in Joyce's work piqued his interest in the fabled Irish writer.
At the time, Bowen recorded singing commercials in a campus radio studio and knew professional Philadelphia actors who could do Irish accents.
Bowen offered ``to make a demonstration tape of a chapter of Ulysses with the actual music referred to in the text as background for [protagonist Leopold] Bloom's thoughts.'
His professor accepted it ``in lieu of a term paper and I was on the way to a career glossing Joyce's musical references.'
That tape led to the Folkways series.
Bowen became English-department chairman at Binghamton in 1964, and a decade later -- in an act of uncommon academic generosity -- shared rare research material with a Joyce-loving undergraduate.
INSPIRATION
Music major Kevin McDermott created a concert program of Joycean songs. He had no idea that the English department chairman, Bowen, was a world-renowned Joyce scholar -- and Bowen knew nothing of McDermott's project until students brought them together.
He said, `I will open my file cabinets to you,' ' recalled McDermott, a Boston-area vocalist. There, McDermott found two real crown jewels that had eluded me.'
He incorporated them into a concert that he still performs: Music from the Works of James Joyce, also a CD.
He was hired for the UM job by David Wilson, Arts and Sciences dean at the time.
``With his bargaining abilities,' honed on the used-car lot, Bowen secured a comfortable salary, Wilson said. The two collaborated on song parodies spoofing UM issues like parking and shrinking budgets.
They also co-authored Science and Literature: Bridging the Two Cultures (University Press of Florida, 2001), and taught a course on the subject.
In their final year of teaching the class, Wilson noticed that his friend couldn't remember students' names.
At the end, said Wilson, Zack lost the ability to speak in whole sentences,' especially tragic for someone like Zack. For him, the mind was everything.'
In addition to his wife and Zack Jr., of West Chester, Penn., Bowen is survived by daughters Patricia Bowen Babcock, of Wilmington, Del., and Janice Tucker Hill, of Pittsburgh, sons Daniel Bowen, of Wilmington, Randy Tucker, of Islamorada, and Bruce Tucker, of Newark, Del.
A memorial service is planned in late August at UM's Lowe Art Museum. The family suggests memorial donations to the UM English Department.
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