Robert Barry Fowle

We announce with sorrow the passing of Robert Barry Fowle, whose memory of a story told early in the last century was essential to the continuation of this newspaper. Mr. Fowle was 94, in good health until recently, and lucid to the end. Mr. Fowle was born in Boston. Ill-served by his natural parents, he had few advantages beyond the maternal love of an unrelated spinster and an inexhaustible supply of natural grit. His informally-adoptive mother, Georgie Ann Fowle, born in 1854, remembered and passed on to him stories told to her as a girl. One involved a relation leaving Washington DC in a wagon, under a load of hay, as the British burned the city. Another told of “a printer in the family, way back in the olden days, who printed something the authorities didn’t like, so they put him in jail.” Later research recovered the name of the printer: Daniel Fowle, Georgie Ann’s third cousin three times removed. In the depths of the depression Mr. Fowle, his mother, and his older brother Harold—another adopted son of Georgie Ann—invested all of what little they had in a ramshackle camp on a then-remote lake in Washington, New Hampshire, at the far end of a steep, washed-out wagon track. Robert, Harold, and their cousin by marriage Fred Hill, helped by a motley crew of Fred’s friends, made the road passable by Model T. Seventy years later the camp is still in the family, and still ramshackle. The road is still dirt, still precipitous, and still there, a tribute to his natural engineering skills and determination. As a youth he helped pick up rags and deliver eggs from horse-drawn wagons, and delivered telegrams by bicycle. Looking for work once, he got off an elevator on the wrong floor. Since he was there, he applied for a job. Hired as a shipping clerk, he eventually became president of the company. Fired once along the way, he just kept going to work. He tried to enlist in the Navy twice during World War Two. The first time he failed the eye test. The second time, the eye doctor asked him to read the eye chart—which he had just memorized—backwards. He resigned himself to his defense work, which won the coveted Army-Navy E for excellence. As he approached retirement age the company was bought. The new corporate culture didn’t suit him so he quit, at 57, and found another job. In retirement he read copiously, carved birds, skiied well into his seventies, married well after the death of his first wife, served the town of Hillsboro on the Conservation Commission, and gave all who knew him a sterling example of the best aspects of patriarchy.