John Thomas Bowen

1946 - 2022

John Thomas Bowen
1946 - 2022
Longtime northern California attorney Tom Bowen died February 10, 2022 in Shoreline, Washington state, after a brief illness brought on by a stroke. He was 75.
Bowen, who was born in Burbank and raised in Altadena, graduated in 1964 from John Muir High School in Pasadena, California. The elder son of longtime Pasadena public school teachers Eilleen and Charles Bowen, Tom was an award-winning sportswriter at Muir. He went on to study at and graduate from Stanford University (A.B., 1968), and from Stanford Law School (J.D., 1971). He was a devoted fan of the teams of the Stanford Cardinal.
In addition to being an attorney, Tom Bowen was an advocate, and a college teacher. A powerful orator, he was a champion for progressive causes and liberal ideals throughout his life. As a young man of 17, in the Pasadena Independent/Star News he published an Op-Ed supporting racial integration. The occasion was a then recent speech by a Mississippi white supremacist in Pasadena. At that time, those opposed to a just and equitable America were focused on building their movement through opposition to racial integration in schools. William Simmons, the segregationist speaker, had found an adoring crowd of 500 local John Birch Society members and other racists at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. It was an event where the American Nazi Party openly assembled to "protect" the gathering from counter-demonstrators who opposed insipient fascism and who supported the then growing Civil Rights Movement. Tom wrote that men like speaker "Simmons are not merely disgustingly bigoted, they would destroy the way of life we enjoy in America by dividing our citizens into first and second classes, and attempting to control our institutions of government for their own selfish ends." Bowen went to remind the community that at the high school from which he had just graduated —the alma mater he shared with Jackie Robinson— "at Muir learning is conducted in an entirely integrated manner with no ill effects."
His was a life dedicated to the advancement of a more perfect union, of an America that better realized its ideals. At the time of the start of his 50-year marriage to the former Sandra Kirkham (1971), he worked providing legal services to underserved residents in East Palo Alto. He was a teaching fellow in poverty law at Stanford Law; and for many years taught about the law as an adjunct professor for St. Mary's College in Moraga, California. In his courtroom role as an attorney, he worked on behalf of working people served by the organized labor movement. As an associate and later partner in the Bay Area firm Davis, Cowell and Bowe, for three decades he represented union members and their legal needs from Sacramento to south of Fresno. Many, perhaps most, of his clients were unionized firefighters. Additionally, his union clients included culinary workers in Las Vegas, Nevada. As an independent attorney in recent decades, his service to society's less powerful evolved an additional focus on using the legal system to help workers injured in their workplaces.
Throughout his long career he remained a steadfast supporter of the Democratic Party, and a believer in Americans' abilities to forge a better future. In March 2021, he wrote "What sticks with me, albeit through the eyes of a 75-year-old, is how innocent we were to be privileged white kids in what was, at best, a de facto segregated city and how it has not changed all that much today. Indeed, Trump raised ignorance and bigotry to an acceptable species of behavior as he and his followers raced backwards into the twentieth, if not the nineteenth or even eighteenth, century. I am more than hopeful that Joe Biden can turn this around sooner rather than later."
Tom Bowen is survived by his wife of 50 years, Sandra "Sandi" Kirkham Bowen of Auburn, Washington; by two daughters: Susy Bowen of Auburn, Washington and Rebecca Bowen Jamil (Mustafa) of Shoreline, Washington; by two granddaughters, Maya and Hana Jamil of Shoreline, Washington; and by his brother, Gordon Lewis Bowen (Linda) of Temecula, California.