Part I: Mark Jordan’s ode to iconic writer, storyteller Jim Bowsher

MOUNT VERNON — The telephone rang. It was a chilly late afternoon in December of 2003. I was sitting at the desk in my apartment that I rented from the Mansfield Playhouse, half of their old costume storage building.

I answered the phone. It was Susie Schaus, the Playhouse secretary.

“Mark, I have a message for you,” she said. “Some guy called and said he was looking for the person who wrote the play about Ceely Rose. He really wants to talk to you.” 

I took in a sudden breath. That sounded ominous that someone said they wanted to talk to me about the historical drama I had just written and directed at Malabar Farm State Park.

Susie heard my intake of breath.

“I don’t think it’s anything bad,” she quickly said. “He’s real friendly. And, oh boy, is he a talker!” 

She gave me the number, and I contemplated it for an hour, then decided I had to see what it was all about. So, I dialed the number.

“Jim Bowsher,” a tart, mischievous voice answered.

That phone call changed my life. I didn’t know it when we started talking, but by the time we hung up approximately three hours later, I knew it. 

I had encountered for the first of many times, the inimitable James R. Bowsher, writer, storyteller, artist, historian, teacher, philosopher, archaeologist, trickster, force of nature, and all-round agent provocateur. 

The Wapakoneta resident had sought me out because an artefact related to the Ceely Rose story had come into his hands, and he wondered if I had any further pictures by which we could authenticate it beyond the provenance story he had.

The artefact was the very locket that Ceely Rose wore around her neck for decades of detention in first the Toledo State Hospital, then the Lima State Hospital, where she was kept because she had murdered her family with poison in 1896. 

That treasured locket? It was her mother’s engagement locket, showing tintype pictures of David and Rebecca Rose from around the time of their wedding in 1855. 

Ceely treasured it and, according to the story that came with it, would kneel down next to her bed before sleep and pray to see her parents again — the same parents she murdered.

How did Jim end up with this extraordinary item? 

It was given to him by the family of a guard at the Lima State Hospital who had kept it as a souvenir of Ceely after she passed.

After the guard himself passed away, the family was understandably creeped out by having a piece of jewelry owned by a person who was, by definition, a serial killer, no matter now nice the hospital staff thought she was. 

So, they thought of Jim Bowsher, renowned collector of historical oddities, and presented it to him. It became one of thousands of items in Jim’s collection, which he would take around and do talks about.

Why am I writing about Jim for my History Knox column? 

Well, for one, my soul needs to write something about this extraordinary individual, who passed away on June 12 after a long struggle with cancer. 

I can justify it here by pointing out that Jim came and spoke a number of times in the long-running Chautauqua series in Mount Vernon. 

Instead of portraying historical characters, though, Jim simply told the stories of pieces from his collection, and then invited the audience to examine the items up close afterwards. 

Many Knox County residents will remember Jim from these talks, where he proved a master at taking his listeners from being doubled over with laughter to pin-drop silence, sometimes in less than a minute.

When I first visited Jim’s almost unbelievable home in Wapakoneta, I spent the whole day, and came home exhausted but tingling with inspiration. Jim had given me interesting directions to his house: 

“Come off I-75 into Wapak, past the Lowe’s, turn right on Wood Street, and it’s the only house it could be.” 

When I got there, I found a house with a small bomb hanging from the eaves with the word “LOVE” painted on it. A few other items of peculiar décor graced the tangled front yard and porch. 

Turns out, that was by far the most subdued part of the property. Jim’s house was a true museum of historical oddities. 

He had been interviewing people, collecting stories and the objects associated with them, since he was a child. And I mean that literally.

His church pastor identified him at age 6 as being one of those rare people singled out by the great hand of fate to have the gift of Blarney: He was a talker, and he had to get something to talk about, so he also learned how to be a listener.

One of his most stunning stories came from an early encounter. There was a cranky old man who lived on their street that all the children were terrified of. Jim got that, but he heard one of the adults say that the old man was a war veteran.

Not World War II, as this story was taking place in the mid-1950s. This guy was a veteran of World War I. 

Jim decided that he couldn’t pass up the chance to talk to a man who had actually been in that conflict, which Jim had already read books about, taking an early interest in history. So, he mustered up his courage, and went to knock on the man’s door.

The old man, surly as ever, wasn’t pleased to see an obnoxious child at his door. After his initial suspicions at the boy’s intentions, the old man let him in, and sat down with him to talk in his living room. 

Finding the boy’s questions about war both sincere and unnerving, the old gentleman had a strange look come over him.

“So, you want to know what war is?” he finally said. 

Jim nodded yes, eager to learn. 

“Wait here a minute.” 

The old man left and started looking for something in one of his closets. He came back carrying a large bullet casing. And he started telling a story about an experience he had. 

It happened while a ferocious battle was raging. Bullets were flying, shells were exploding, and smoke made it impossible to see. The young soldier was lost and terrified. He saw a ditch and jumped into it for cover. 

As he came to a stop, the smoke cleared, and he realized he had landed next to a German soldier who had had the same thought and sought cover in the ditch. The two young men looked at each other, wide-eyed, for a long time. 

Who would make a move first? Could they somehow just co-exist and stop the war for a moment, right there where they were safe? 

As the German looked at the American soldier, his face suddenly relaxed, and he began to smile, nodding at him. He started to reach into his jacket.

Panicked that the German was pulling a pistol or a knife on him, the American leaped up and in one move shoved the bayonet of his rifle into the German’s stomach. 

For a couple seconds, the German’s face took on a look of disbelief and confusion. Then blood trickled out of his mouth, and he died.

The American panted for several moments, still hunched over the German, until he felt his cross, dangling from the chain around his own neck. When the German had nodded, he was pointing at the American soldier’s crucifix necklace. 

The American sat back, with a terrible feeling. He reached out for the dead German’s hand, still in his jacket.

When he pulled it out, he found that the German had been reaching for a cartridge that had a notch cut into one side of it. When you slid the casing open, it revealed a miniature prayer shrine, with a tiny white cross, inside the bullet casing. 

The man had been reaching for his shrine, to show it to another believer.

The old man handed the bullet shrine to young Jim.

“I’ve had to live with that my whole life,” the old man said. “That’s war.” 

He told Jim to keep it and tell people about it. And so he did.

It started Jim to a lifetime of collecting stories and objects that went with them. He had inkwells that once belonged to Edgar Allen Poe and Leon Trotsky, a spoon from Thoreau’s Walden Pond, a Civil War general’s wallet.

That reminds me of another story. Just meeting Jim was an extraordinary link to history, because if you shook his hand, then you shook the hand of a person who shook the hand of an actual Civil War veteran. 

A couple years into his project of interviewing people, young Jim heard about one of the last Civil War veterans still alive in the early 1950s. It was mentioned in the newspaper that the man was in the hospital in Toledo.

Jim talked his father into driving him up to Toledo to attempt to interview the man, who was over 100 years old, and had been a drummer boy during the war. 

The hospital didn’t want to let him see the man, but the boy begged, pointing out what a rare opportunity it would be for a modern boy to shake the hand of a Civil War veteran. 

They finally let him visit the room, and the man wasn’t very talkative. But Jim was able to get him to tell him just a little bit about what it was like to be a drummer boy. 

The gentleman had ended up in the Union army because his brother tried to take care of him after their parents died, but the brother couldn’t get much good work, so he joined the army, towing the tyke along with him. 

Eventually, someone stitched a miniature uniform for the child, and they gave him a drum. The boy was eager to see action with the adult soldiers, so they finally gave him a chance to march with them into battle.

The drummer boy was at that time younger than Jim was, interviewing him almost a century later.

There was no glory. Confronted with bullets, cannonballs, and bloody bayonets, the little boy peed his pants and ran crying from the battlefield. He wanted Jim to know that war wasn’t glory, it was hell. 

With that story, the old man was done, and ended the interview. He passed away soon after.

Jim had a talent for drawing out people. 

Playwright Edward Albee, who ferociously refused to sign autographs, was about to snarl when Jim once approached him after a show with a pen.

“No, no,” Jim said. “This is different.” 

He handed Albee a picture of himself and told him he just wanted the playwright to write across the photo the most important word to him. Albee narrowed his eyes at Jim, then gave a slight, wry smile.

He grabbed the photo and the pen and wrote “play” on the picture.

He had a whole house full of things like that. He had items that will be going to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C., now that he’s passed, including a mint condition Vandegraaf generator, in better shape than the one the national museum has. 

I always pictured Jim running into his dining room at three in the morning, cranking up the Vandegraaf and cackling madly as it shot bolts of electricity back and forth.

He had sacred items which had come into his possession related to the history and culture of the Shawnee tribe.

He at first attempted to give these items directly to the Shawnee nation, but tribal elders decided that if the world had steered them to Jim first, that was where they were meant to be for a time. 

The tribe sent an official delegation to visit Jim and their artifacts every year. Now that he’s gone, the items will go directly to the tribe.

Hollywood once tried to turn Jim’s stories into a television show, House of the Unknown. They filmed a pilot episode, for which I was interviewed as well.

But I had a feeling it wasn’t going to take off, because they insisted on inserting a narrator, and lots of camera shots of locations, photographs, and artefacts. 

They were afraid to just point a camera on Jim and let it run. The style of the day demands lots of edits, weird camera angles, etc., etc. The pilot was filmed, and it wasn’t bad. 

They shopped it around Hollywood, and one major channel dithered about it for weeks before turning it down.

The production company flew Jim out to Hollywood for a strategy session, talking about shopping it elsewhere, or possibly re-editing or even reshooting parts of the pilot.

To the producers’ shock, Jim pulled the plug.

“Your technology is too primitive,” he said. 

They balked at that, but Jim insisted. 

“Listen, with all your fancy gadgets and editing, you can create an image that will make a million people see that one image. With my words, those million people are going to see a million different images.

“They are all going to conjure up their own images that are more personal and more powerful than anything you can make with all your bells and whistles. You tell me which technology is more primitive.” 

He canceled the whole project. He lost more than a few friends over that move.

I’ve barely touched upon the thousands of stories attached to Jim’s collection — and that’s just the house. 

In next week’s column, I will look at Jim’s magnum opus, the Temple of Tolerance.