Telltale Objects
This new series shares the stories of interesting artifacts at Willamette.
Several years ago, environmental and earth sciences professor Joe Bowersox received a phone call from the president’s office. A class of 1889 photo on the wall was inscribed with the name “A.O. Bowersox.” Any relation? Bowersox knew his great-grandfather’s name was Arthur Orwig Bowersox, but he didn’t think he attended college — let alone Willamette University. In fact, Bowersox knew nothing about the man except his grisly death in 1900 following an accident at the family farm near Philomath, Oregon. Just the week before, Bowersox had serendipitously stumbled on his greatgrandfather’s portrait in a stack of old family photos. So when he went over to the president’s office, he recognized the familiar face in the group of pharmacy graduates. “Shocked doesn’t cover what I felt — I remember being really overwhelmed,” he says. “Literally, the only scrap of information we had of him was the studio photo that was clearly taken at the same time as the class photo. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have recognized him at all.” Further evidence of the Bowersox family’s ties to Willamette emerged a year later, when a medical bag owned by Arthur Bowersox’s younger brother, Willamette medical student Frederick Bowersox, class of 1899, was located in the university’s archives. His children had presented it as a gift to the university in 1969. These discoveries meant a lot to Bowersox’s family, but especially to his father, who learned of his grandfather’s background before he died last year. Later, Bowersox found out even more relatives had connections to Willamette. He says, “I didn’t realize this was a bit of a family tradition.”
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FALL 2017