Who was C.W. Bowie?

 C.W. Bowie is the pen name of three writers.  (no room on a book spine for all of our names, therefore we created C.W. Bowie. )

C is Claudine Wirths.  W is me.  

And the third part - Bowie- is a shortened version of Mary Bowman-Kruhm's name.  

Together we wrote the picture books - Busy Toes and the companion book - Busy Fingers. 

We had a lot of fun creating those books. It was in the mid- 1990s and the internet was in its infancy, but we kept sending the manuscripts back and forth by this new thing called email.  

I had met one of them on a computer bulletin board that was using GE's computers at night, because at that point, businesses stopped using their computers when everyone went home, so someone got permission to use it and called the internet bulletin Board - GEnie - and off we went. Many, many different subject areas. My husband was in an antique auto group and discovered there was a writer's group there (several of them) and he got me into that group and I met so many other writers, famous and not. I met Claudine there and she introduced me to AOL and the writer's boards there so I could meet her writing partner, Mary, and off we three went, writing together.

Boys and books - memories

We were talking on FaceBook about boys and books and it kicked off a memory:

When I spent a week doing author presentations about writing books (featuring my books) to various Chicago Libraries as part of their Summer Reading program in the early 2000s, at one library the audience was full of boys from a summer camp. Boy Scout or some other camp.

  As usual, after discussing my other books, when I got to discussing picture books I began by reading Busy Toes which was created by three of us - Mary Bowman-Kruhm, Claudine Wirths, and me under the pen name of C.W. Bowie.  (Yes, I'm the W part.)  Then I talked about how we discussed what to write next and began thinking of things we could do with our fingers. At this point in my presentation I always ask the children in the audience to think of things we could do with our fingers.

Well!  Those boys kept coming up with outrageous suggestions.  I kept my face serious and receptive (while giggling inside) and kept saying, "Ya know, we just didn't think of that one."  Meanwhile the librarian at that branch in the back of the room had turned around to face the back wall -- she was either so embarrassed, or was also giggling.  She worried I'd be offended by their suggestions.   :)

Not to worry.  I'd been a Children's Librarian too long not to be aware of the things boys can think up.

Thoughts from a Southern Lady

One third of the writers who wrote with me under the pen name of C. W. Bowie was Claudine Wirths.
(If she were alive today she'd be in her 90s if not reaching 100 years old, so you know she remembered how things were from a long, long time ago,)

When I was writing the biography of Marian Wright Edelman, I pondered about word use.  Because of what Claudine told me, I opted to use the terms for people of color being used in each time period - her youth, her young married life, and 'modern times' (the 1990s).

This is what Claudine told me were the 'proper' ways, at least in the south where she grew up:

"I went from Colored people
to Darkies
to Nigra
to KneeGrow (Southerners had to mentally write it that way in their heads to say it right)
to Black
to African American
to People of Color  -- which was circling back to where I started -- almost!

Sigh, I try to be PC, but am despairing"
           Claudine G. Wirths

Well
Did my editor appreciate how careful I had been to use the correct terms for each time period?
Nope.
He insisted that everything be African American, even though Marian Wright Edelman preferred to use the term -- People of Color.