My father died on June 16 less than a month before his 98th birthday. What follows here are his obituary, a eulogy by my brother, Bryan Dowd, and my mini-homily, which followed the eulogy at the memorial service on July 16 at First Baptist Church, Rome, Georgia.
Edward James Dowd, age 97, went home to be with Jesus on Thursday, June 16, 2016. Mr. Dowd was born in Brooklyn, New York, one of four children of Edward Charles and Mary Lord Dowd. He graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and served in the U.S. Army and later as a navigator with Pan American Airlines during World War II, ferrying personnel and supplies from Brazil to Africa and the Middle East. During the war, he met and married Doris Mae Dellinger of Rome. They returned to Rome after the war and he went to work with his father-in-law, Walter Dellinger at Dellinger Incorporated, making chenille bedspreads, and later custom carpeting which was distributed nationwide. Doris Dowd passed away in 1987 and a few years later, Mr. Dowd married Hazel Hay and they had nineteen happy years together before her death in 2008. Mr. Dowd was a selfless and devoted husband and father. He gave his children and many of his grandchildren the college education that he never had and took great pride in their accomplishments. He was a faithful member of First Baptist Church in Rome and attended Sunday School and church services up to the time of his death. He was active in Campus Crusade and a generous supporter of many Christian ministries. He is survived by three children, Sharyn Dowd of Decatur, Georgia; Bryan Dowd of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Doris Lord Moss of Mableton, Georgia. He also has two step-children, Lucy Vick of Cincinnati, Ohio and Willard (Dub) Hay of Sonoma, California; six grandchildren, three step-grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren, and two step-great-grandchildren, and many nephews and nieces, including Penney Mitchell Burton of Rome and Mary Inglis of Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. The family would like to thank all of the friends in Rome who provided love and support for Mr. Dowd in recent years, especially Debra Garrett and Erin Massingill of Right at Home Care, Mike Scofield and Sharman Turner, and all his friends in the O. M. Cates Class at First Baptist.
A memorial service for Edward Dowd will be held at First Baptist Church of Rome on Saturday, July 16. The family will receive friends at 10 a.m. in the small dining room and the service will be in the chapel at 11 a.m. Instead of flowers, Mr. Dowd may be honored by contributions to First Baptist Church, 100 E 4th Ave, Rome, GA 30161. Daniel’s Funeral Home is in charge of arrangements.
Eulogy for Edward Dowd
Bryan Dowd
July 16, 2016
Before saying a word about our Dad, I’d like to say a word about First Baptist Church of Rome, Georgia. When Paul wrote letters, he usually started off with a word of thanksgiving. Here he is writing to the Philippians.
“I thank my God every time I remember you in all my prayers for all of you. I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”
When I think of First Baptist Church in Rome, Georgia, I think of a geyser gushing forth young Christians people who end up all over the globe. It might be the most important thing you do. Don’t ever stop. Don’t ever let anything distract you. God bless you, and God bless your search for your new pastor.
When thinking about what I was going to say, I found myself doing what one should never do, which trying to think of the one word that best summarizes a person you know.
In our Dad’s case, I thought that word would be devotion, but if you knew our Dad, you probably would agree that simple devotion is a little anemic. Fierce devotion, works a lot better. But even that misses perhaps his most important personality trait, so I added “selfless” fierce devotion – to God, family, country, and any other worthy cause that he encountered.
To illustrate, let’s take things in reverse chronological order, starting with the grandchildren. He had six of them and he put four of them through college. He also put his three children through college. He graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and was rightly proud of it, but he always felt a little inadequate because he hadn’t been able to go to college. Personally, I think he was mistaken about that. I have his report cards from Erasmus, and I think it would be more accurate to say that he got a 2016-version college education. It’s just that he got it eighty years ago in high school in Brooklyn. At any rate, he made sure that the rest of his family got a college education, too.
He certainly was a devoted husband and father. He had many interests, but no hobbies because those would have taken time away from his family. I wrote him a letter about 25 years ago telling him what a great Dad he was. I said, “How many children can say that they never heard their father raise his voice, utter a swear word, or a single racial or ethnic slur?” I’m not saying “except when he was angry,” and gave him plenty of opportunities to be angry. I’m saying “never.”
He was a good brother and stayed in close contact with his New York relatives, especially his little sister Florence. After my Mom died, he decided to go to Ireland, but not before making sure that Florence could go, too, because she couldn’t have gone otherwise. He was close to his brother, John Dowd, who had returned from the war with what today we probably would call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Our Dad once had to go rescue him at McArthur Airport on Long Island when he was having a bad spell.
He was devoted to his father, for whom he was named. We have some of the regular correspondence he maintained with his Dad when he was in the service. There’s a lot of mutual affection there.
He was a steadfast friend. I have a letter he wrote to a buddy during the war that was returned because his buddy was missing in action. Yet when we hosted a dinner for his 90th birthday that many of you attended, he said, “I can’t believe I have so many friends!”
He would say, like my aunt Madge, that he was “blessed beyond words,” but in reality, his life was no bed of roses. His mother died at the beginning of the Great Depression when he was 10. Like many children of that era, he was taken in by his aunt’s family so his Dad could concentrate on saving the marine supply business in the Brooklyn navy yards. He had nightmares all his life about coming back to Brooklyn as a child and finding he had no home.
He once watched the DC3 ahead of him take off, crash, and burn, killing everyone on board because no one removed the chocks from the elevators and rudder on the plane. Experiences like that make an impression on you. He was obsessive about details. It drove us a little bit crazy, but as he would say, that’s how you “fly the South Atlantic 47 times without getting your feet wet.”
His job with Pan Am during the war was to find Ascension Island in the middle of the South Atlantic in the dark without radio. When they got halfway from Rio or Africa to Ascension he would tell the pilot whether or not he would be able to find the Island that night. If he said “Yes” they went on, and if he said “No” they went back. This was when he was 23 years old. He always knew where he was and where he was going, but never imagined that he was flying the plane. That pretty much sums up his Christian faith, as well.
He had the unpleasant experience of burying his mother and two wonderful wives, and I think that he might have wondered if there was any such thing as love that wasn’t at risk of being snatched away for reasons beyond his control. He’s not wondering now, and as hard as it may be for us to believe, I think he’s leaping for joy and may decide to keep leaping for the next ten thousand years or so before he gets a hold of himself.
He was a human being, and thus he wasn’t a perfect person, but I have no reservation in recommending him as the standard for selfless, fierce, devotion and – next to Jesus – self-sacrificial love, to which we all can aspire.
“The Christian Hope”
Memorial service for Edward James Dowd, 1918 – 2016
First Baptist Church, Rome, Georgia, July 16, 2016
Let’s pray: Lord, you are our refuge and our strength---our very present help in time of trouble. Fill our minds and hearts with your peace this day, we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen
Most of us in this room have lost someone very important to us to the cold hand of death. One such loss is the reason that we have gathered here this morning. As Christians, we comfort ourselves with the thought that death is not the last word and that after our own death (or at the coming of Christ, whichever comes first), we will again enjoy the company of those we have loved and lost.
Unlike a lot of things we believe, there is a real Biblical basis for the Christians’ hope that we will be reunited with and will recognize each other. After Jesus’s own death and resurrection, he was recognized (sometimes belatedly, but finally recognized) by those who had known and loved him before his crucifixion. And because Paul makes the claim that our resurrected bodies will be like the resurrected body of Jesus, we believe that we too, will recognize each other in our life together after death. Listen to Paul’s words from 1 Corinthians 15:
“Now I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand . . . For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received:
That Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures,
And that he was buried,
And that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures,
And that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.
Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. . . .
For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ.. But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ.”
Paul proceeds to carry on at length about how the physical body dies, but is raised, or transformed, into a spiritual body. By the way, if anybody claims to understand exactly what a spiritual body is, she’s lying. We don’t have any idea how to think about a body that is NOT physical but is, nevertheless, A BODY --- not merely a ghostly spirit. But never mind that. We don’t have to know to hope that Paul knows what he’s talking about, since, unlike us, Paul had actually seen the spiritual body of the resurrected Jesus.
But here’s the important part --- 1 Corinthians 15:53-58:
“For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled:
‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.
Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?’
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”
That, beloved, is our hope. That was the hope of Willard Hay, of Doris Dowd, of Hazel Hay Dowd, and of Edward Dowd. They always excelled in the work of the Lord as they understood it, in the hope that in the Lord their labor was not in vain. Their hope is our hope---that the One we haltingly follow has gone before us into death and has come striding out with the keys to death and hell swinging from his belt. Again, Paul assures us in Romans 14:7-9:
“We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.”
We are going to sing together a gospel song that our parents loved to sing. When Kenneth Moyers played it on the organ, it was inspiring. When Willard Hay played it on the organ it was entertaining! I loved to watch Willard play the organ because he bounced on the bench when he played. We sang this song at church; we sang it at home, we played it in our living room on North Broad Street with the Hufstetler brothers and Bryan on brass and the rest of us on woodwinds or keyboard. We played it on the piano when one of our parents would say, “Play some hymns.”
“When We All Get to Heaven” was written by Eliza Edmunds Hewitt, who was a friend of the better known writer of gospel songs, Fanny Crosby. Eliza was a public school teacher in Philadelphia, but was permanently disabled when one of her students hit her with a piece of slate. (Any teacher will tell you that the classroom has always been a dangerous place.) “Lying in bed, Eliza could have been bitter. Instead, she studied English literature and began to sing and write: Sing the wondrous love of Jesus, sing his mercy and his grace.”
As you sing, you may notice something interesting: Eliza Hewitt was not focused on seeing anybody in heaven except Jesus. Maybe when she wrote this song she hadn’t lost anybody who was important to her. I don’t know. But I suspect that it may be that our interest in our loved ones, however dear, may fade into the background when we come face to face with the one who became one of us, took all our idolatry and brokenness into himself and died of it, and then shattered the power of brokenness and death forever. Death swallow up all humankind, but Death has been swallowed up in victory. Thanks be to God!
Let’s pray: Living Lord, you are our only hope. We cling to you and we celebrate your unspeakable gift as we cope with loss and grief on this road that we walk. We thank you for walking it ahead of us. Amen.
Sharyn Dowd
Edward James Dowd, age 97, went home to be with Jesus on Thursday, June 16, 2016. Mr. Dowd was born in Brooklyn, New York, one of four children of Edward Charles and Mary Lord Dowd. He graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and served in the U.S. Army and later as a navigator with Pan American Airlines during World War II, ferrying personnel and supplies from Brazil to Africa and the Middle East. During the war, he met and married Doris Mae Dellinger of Rome. They returned to Rome after the war and he went to work with his father-in-law, Walter Dellinger at Dellinger Incorporated, making chenille bedspreads, and later custom carpeting which was distributed nationwide. Doris Dowd passed away in 1987 and a few years later, Mr. Dowd married Hazel Hay and they had nineteen happy years together before her death in 2008. Mr. Dowd was a selfless and devoted husband and father. He gave his children and many of his grandchildren the college education that he never had and took great pride in their accomplishments. He was a faithful member of First Baptist Church in Rome and attended Sunday School and church services up to the time of his death. He was active in Campus Crusade and a generous supporter of many Christian ministries. He is survived by three children, Sharyn Dowd of Decatur, Georgia; Bryan Dowd of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Doris Lord Moss of Mableton, Georgia. He also has two step-children, Lucy Vick of Cincinnati, Ohio and Willard (Dub) Hay of Sonoma, California; six grandchildren, three step-grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren, and two step-great-grandchildren, and many nephews and nieces, including Penney Mitchell Burton of Rome and Mary Inglis of Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. The family would like to thank all of the friends in Rome who provided love and support for Mr. Dowd in recent years, especially Debra Garrett and Erin Massingill of Right at Home Care, Mike Scofield and Sharman Turner, and all his friends in the O. M. Cates Class at First Baptist.
A memorial service for Edward Dowd will be held at First Baptist Church of Rome on Saturday, July 16. The family will receive friends at 10 a.m. in the small dining room and the service will be in the chapel at 11 a.m. Instead of flowers, Mr. Dowd may be honored by contributions to First Baptist Church, 100 E 4th Ave, Rome, GA 30161. Daniel’s Funeral Home is in charge of arrangements.
Eulogy for Edward Dowd
Bryan Dowd
July 16, 2016
Before saying a word about our Dad, I’d like to say a word about First Baptist Church of Rome, Georgia. When Paul wrote letters, he usually started off with a word of thanksgiving. Here he is writing to the Philippians.
“I thank my God every time I remember you in all my prayers for all of you. I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”
When I think of First Baptist Church in Rome, Georgia, I think of a geyser gushing forth young Christians people who end up all over the globe. It might be the most important thing you do. Don’t ever stop. Don’t ever let anything distract you. God bless you, and God bless your search for your new pastor.
When thinking about what I was going to say, I found myself doing what one should never do, which trying to think of the one word that best summarizes a person you know.
In our Dad’s case, I thought that word would be devotion, but if you knew our Dad, you probably would agree that simple devotion is a little anemic. Fierce devotion, works a lot better. But even that misses perhaps his most important personality trait, so I added “selfless” fierce devotion – to God, family, country, and any other worthy cause that he encountered.
To illustrate, let’s take things in reverse chronological order, starting with the grandchildren. He had six of them and he put four of them through college. He also put his three children through college. He graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and was rightly proud of it, but he always felt a little inadequate because he hadn’t been able to go to college. Personally, I think he was mistaken about that. I have his report cards from Erasmus, and I think it would be more accurate to say that he got a 2016-version college education. It’s just that he got it eighty years ago in high school in Brooklyn. At any rate, he made sure that the rest of his family got a college education, too.
He certainly was a devoted husband and father. He had many interests, but no hobbies because those would have taken time away from his family. I wrote him a letter about 25 years ago telling him what a great Dad he was. I said, “How many children can say that they never heard their father raise his voice, utter a swear word, or a single racial or ethnic slur?” I’m not saying “except when he was angry,” and gave him plenty of opportunities to be angry. I’m saying “never.”
He was a good brother and stayed in close contact with his New York relatives, especially his little sister Florence. After my Mom died, he decided to go to Ireland, but not before making sure that Florence could go, too, because she couldn’t have gone otherwise. He was close to his brother, John Dowd, who had returned from the war with what today we probably would call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Our Dad once had to go rescue him at McArthur Airport on Long Island when he was having a bad spell.
He was devoted to his father, for whom he was named. We have some of the regular correspondence he maintained with his Dad when he was in the service. There’s a lot of mutual affection there.
He was a steadfast friend. I have a letter he wrote to a buddy during the war that was returned because his buddy was missing in action. Yet when we hosted a dinner for his 90th birthday that many of you attended, he said, “I can’t believe I have so many friends!”
He would say, like my aunt Madge, that he was “blessed beyond words,” but in reality, his life was no bed of roses. His mother died at the beginning of the Great Depression when he was 10. Like many children of that era, he was taken in by his aunt’s family so his Dad could concentrate on saving the marine supply business in the Brooklyn navy yards. He had nightmares all his life about coming back to Brooklyn as a child and finding he had no home.
He once watched the DC3 ahead of him take off, crash, and burn, killing everyone on board because no one removed the chocks from the elevators and rudder on the plane. Experiences like that make an impression on you. He was obsessive about details. It drove us a little bit crazy, but as he would say, that’s how you “fly the South Atlantic 47 times without getting your feet wet.”
His job with Pan Am during the war was to find Ascension Island in the middle of the South Atlantic in the dark without radio. When they got halfway from Rio or Africa to Ascension he would tell the pilot whether or not he would be able to find the Island that night. If he said “Yes” they went on, and if he said “No” they went back. This was when he was 23 years old. He always knew where he was and where he was going, but never imagined that he was flying the plane. That pretty much sums up his Christian faith, as well.
He had the unpleasant experience of burying his mother and two wonderful wives, and I think that he might have wondered if there was any such thing as love that wasn’t at risk of being snatched away for reasons beyond his control. He’s not wondering now, and as hard as it may be for us to believe, I think he’s leaping for joy and may decide to keep leaping for the next ten thousand years or so before he gets a hold of himself.
He was a human being, and thus he wasn’t a perfect person, but I have no reservation in recommending him as the standard for selfless, fierce, devotion and – next to Jesus – self-sacrificial love, to which we all can aspire.
“The Christian Hope”
Memorial service for Edward James Dowd, 1918 – 2016
First Baptist Church, Rome, Georgia, July 16, 2016
Let’s pray: Lord, you are our refuge and our strength---our very present help in time of trouble. Fill our minds and hearts with your peace this day, we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen
Most of us in this room have lost someone very important to us to the cold hand of death. One such loss is the reason that we have gathered here this morning. As Christians, we comfort ourselves with the thought that death is not the last word and that after our own death (or at the coming of Christ, whichever comes first), we will again enjoy the company of those we have loved and lost.
Unlike a lot of things we believe, there is a real Biblical basis for the Christians’ hope that we will be reunited with and will recognize each other. After Jesus’s own death and resurrection, he was recognized (sometimes belatedly, but finally recognized) by those who had known and loved him before his crucifixion. And because Paul makes the claim that our resurrected bodies will be like the resurrected body of Jesus, we believe that we too, will recognize each other in our life together after death. Listen to Paul’s words from 1 Corinthians 15:
“Now I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand . . . For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received:
That Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures,
And that he was buried,
And that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures,
And that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.
Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. . . .
For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ.. But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ.”
Paul proceeds to carry on at length about how the physical body dies, but is raised, or transformed, into a spiritual body. By the way, if anybody claims to understand exactly what a spiritual body is, she’s lying. We don’t have any idea how to think about a body that is NOT physical but is, nevertheless, A BODY --- not merely a ghostly spirit. But never mind that. We don’t have to know to hope that Paul knows what he’s talking about, since, unlike us, Paul had actually seen the spiritual body of the resurrected Jesus.
But here’s the important part --- 1 Corinthians 15:53-58:
“For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled:
‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.
Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?’
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”
That, beloved, is our hope. That was the hope of Willard Hay, of Doris Dowd, of Hazel Hay Dowd, and of Edward Dowd. They always excelled in the work of the Lord as they understood it, in the hope that in the Lord their labor was not in vain. Their hope is our hope---that the One we haltingly follow has gone before us into death and has come striding out with the keys to death and hell swinging from his belt. Again, Paul assures us in Romans 14:7-9:
“We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.”
We are going to sing together a gospel song that our parents loved to sing. When Kenneth Moyers played it on the organ, it was inspiring. When Willard Hay played it on the organ it was entertaining! I loved to watch Willard play the organ because he bounced on the bench when he played. We sang this song at church; we sang it at home, we played it in our living room on North Broad Street with the Hufstetler brothers and Bryan on brass and the rest of us on woodwinds or keyboard. We played it on the piano when one of our parents would say, “Play some hymns.”
“When We All Get to Heaven” was written by Eliza Edmunds Hewitt, who was a friend of the better known writer of gospel songs, Fanny Crosby. Eliza was a public school teacher in Philadelphia, but was permanently disabled when one of her students hit her with a piece of slate. (Any teacher will tell you that the classroom has always been a dangerous place.) “Lying in bed, Eliza could have been bitter. Instead, she studied English literature and began to sing and write: Sing the wondrous love of Jesus, sing his mercy and his grace.”
As you sing, you may notice something interesting: Eliza Hewitt was not focused on seeing anybody in heaven except Jesus. Maybe when she wrote this song she hadn’t lost anybody who was important to her. I don’t know. But I suspect that it may be that our interest in our loved ones, however dear, may fade into the background when we come face to face with the one who became one of us, took all our idolatry and brokenness into himself and died of it, and then shattered the power of brokenness and death forever. Death swallow up all humankind, but Death has been swallowed up in victory. Thanks be to God!
Let’s pray: Living Lord, you are our only hope. We cling to you and we celebrate your unspeakable gift as we cope with loss and grief on this road that we walk. We thank you for walking it ahead of us. Amen.
Sharyn Dowd