A. Dane Bowen Jr.

Alexandria, Virginia A. Dane Bowen, Jr., a retired Foreign Service Officer and professor emeritus of economics and history, died July 18, 2011 at his home, in Alexandria, Virginia of complications from congestive heart failure. A memorial service will be held 2:00 P.M on Sunday, July 31, 2011 at the Stephenville Funeral Home. Born in Fort Worth, Texas, January 26, 1927, Dr. Bowen was reared in rural West Texas. Running away from home when he was 16, he supported himself as a soda jerk and college janitor while completing two high school credits and four semesters of college. Before the age of 18 he graduated as valedictorian from John Tarleton, a two-year college that was part of the Texas A. and M. system. Before 18 he also joined the Navy during World War II, becoming a signalman. When the war was over, he won an appointment by competitive exams to one of 100 slots set aside at the U.S. Naval Academy for enlisted men. This was when there were 3.5 million in the Navy and Marine Corps. Looking over the Academy, he resigned the appointment before his first class, hitchhiked to Austin, and enrolled at the University of Texas under the G. I. Bill. He received a B.A. and M.A. there in Modern European History. He taught in the public schools in El Paso and at Texas A. and I. University in Kingsville and Wayland Baptist College in Plainview the Texas Panhandle. In 1955 he joined the Foreign Service and earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1956. Dr. Bowen served successively in U.S. Embassies in Switzerland, Paraguay, Sweden, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Dominican Republic. He was sent to Nice, France, to improve his French and at mid-career to Princeton to study graduate economics. His wife, Joyce Lenora Yocum Bowen, who accompanied him to all of these posts, worked in the Consular Section in Santo Domingo. Their marriage of 33 years ended in divorce. Dr. Bowen was the top officer in the American Embassy in Paraguay when word was received over a teletype machine of an UPI news story in Spanish that President Kennedy had been assassinated. In Stockholm he represented the U.S. Embassy at the Nobel Prize Banquet when the Swedish crown prince announced the creation of a Nobel Prize in economics. His Washington assignments included National Security Advisor for Latin America to Treasury Secretaries John Connally, George Shultz, and William Simon, and Deputy Coordinator and Acting Coordinator of Cuban Affairs. The latter was during the Carter Administration when a limited diplomatic presence in Havana was re-established. Dr. Bowen went three times to Havana to negotiate with the Castro regime. His last assignment before retiring from the Foreign Service in August 1980 was working on the task force coping with the massive influx of Cuban Marielito refugees. Dr. Bowen won a Meritorious Honor Award and various special awards, including a Superior Honor Award for service in assisting the release of the U.S. Ambassador to Colombia who was held hostage in 1980 for 61 days. Returning to teaching in 1980, Dr. Bowen became within three years a tenured full professor of economics and history at the state university of Pennsylvania at Lock Haven. He received research grants at the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Latin American Studies and from Cornell University. He became Chairman of his University's International Education Exchange Committee at a time when the university was greatly expanding its overseas program. In 1984 he and a companion Susan Grady led a group of university exchange students from Maine to Texas for extended study in Lublin, Poland, behind the Iron Curtain. The following year Dr. Bowen (along with Ms. Grady) went to India as a Fulbright professor, where they were received by Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in the Prime Minister's official residence in Delhi. In 1988 he and Ms. Grady went deep into China to launch an exchange program by becoming university professors in Changsha, capital of Hunan Province. Caught up in the pro-Democracy movement, they had a great deal of difficulty getting out of China at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989 when Chinese security forces machine gunned the U.S. Embassy compound in Beijing. The U.S. State Department broadcast that planes were being sent to extract Americans from China, but Dr. Bowen and Ms. Grady couldn't reach the collection point in Wuhan, because pro-Democracy demonstrators were lying down across the railroad tracks and highway bridges. After retirement from the Foreign Service, Dr. Bowen became embroiled in a public controversy when he took issue with American politicians and professional Nazi hunters who charged that the U.S. Embassy in Asunción, Paraguay fell down on the job of tracking the Nazi camp doctor Josef Mengele. On March 6, 1985 Dr. Bowen appeared on ABC's nightly "World News Tonight with Peter Jennings." Nazi hunter and author Gerald Posner stated on the newscast and in an exchange of Letters to the Editor of the New York Times that the U.S. Embassy had fallen down on the job of tracking Josef Mengele in Paraguay. Posner also said that Mengele had lived under his own name within ½ mile of the U.S. Embassy in Asunción, Paraguay. When Dr. Bowen retired from teaching in 1992, he returned to Fairfax County, Virginia. He became "an institution" by weekly volunteering for two decades to teach a history seminar at Fairfax County's Lincolnia Senior Citizen's Center. He covered various fields of history: World, 20th Century, Modern European, American and Latin American. He played bridge and chess at local senior citizen centers. Taking courses at the Smithsonian on the ancient Mayan civilization, he and Ms. Grady traveled by motorhome to Mayan sites in Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. A photography enthusiast, he collected photographs of these sites and donated them to local professors. He published scholarly articles on foreign affairs. He also had published in the New York Times and the Washington Post more than a dozen letters to the editor on subjects ranging from archeology and ancient history to national security affairs. Descended on both his father's and his mother's side from settlers in Texas before it became a part of the U.S., he became upon retirement interested in genealogy. After going to Great Britain and France on different trips to research family history, he published two extensive family histories. The one of his mother's family went back centuries and came to 500 pages with 6,000 individuals in the index. Since this family history was set in historical context, it also constituted a thumbnail sketch of a thousand years of the history of the English-speaking people. Dr. Bowen spoke Spanish and French fluently and got around in German and Italian. He is survived by his companion, Susan Grady, by two sons in Fairfax County, Steven Bowen and Scott Bowen, and by a son and granddaughter, Don and Amanda Bowen Butterworth, of Boston. He leaves also a brother, Stan Bowen of New Braunfels, Texas, and a sister, Minta Bowen Mercready, of Houston,