Tonight I celebrate the passing of the most GRM-ish, non-GRMer, Harlow Bower. He deserves a GRM 21-drink salute. No tears, no sadness, none of that "sorry for your loss" stuff, be happy for him. I'll be raising a drink tonight for him. Feel free to have a cold beverage of choice in honor of "Ol' Bower"
Harlow was the inventor of dad jokes. Not really, but I would believe it. He always had some pun or terrible joke that you could barely hear because he talked so quietly. He would pull you close, mumble something in your general direction, then when he started laughing at his own joke, you knew that was the time to groan and pretend you heard it. My favorite one (maybe because it was the only one I actually heard and understood) was:
“What do you get when you merge a four lane highway into a two lane bridge?
A Car Strangled Spanner”
He founded a machine shop and spent 55 years working it alone. He landed a contract with a thermostat company making some kind of brass escutcheons and picked up other machine work here and there. He had a 57 Harley with a panhead which were known for their weak spark. He simply bought another distributor, machined the case, and installed a second distributor. When it didn't do much help, he realized it was requiring too much current... so he rewound the stator to make more juice. He said he had to rewind it a few times to get the right balance of enough current but not overheating. That's the kind of guy Harlow was. The Bower's house was this living museum of all the ingenious contraptions he had built over the years. He never owned a computer, but he would have been an amazing GRMer.
He played in the Franklin Silver Cornet band forever, and when they marched in the July 4th parade, he faithfully joined in long after we expected him to make the 1-mile parade route. The year that he decided he couldn't march anymore, they put him in a mobility scooter and strapped one of the bass drums to the back of it with a drummer following behind.
Harlow will be missed, but I'm glad he's moved on. Cheers, Bower.
