A Life Remembered

Jack Dowman, 84, was a mostly behind-the-scene volunteer. He was involved with government and service groups. He supported the school music programs, and for 10 years he organized the annual Eastham Windmill Weekend Parade. And he did it all just so he could help. 

"He was that kind of a guy who would do anything he could to help anybody," said his friend and fellow Rotary Club member, Dick Morello. "That's what we loved about him."

Welsey Ko probably could have avoided going to war. But as friends from his Philadelphia neighborhood were drafted and joined the fight, Ko decided to go too. He ended his service as a hero. For A Life Remembered, Sean Corcoran profiles Ko, who was 93 when he died.

Five years ago, a WCAI reporter visited Wesley Ko home to interview him about his service in the Second World War.

Maybe lots of people know there are three verses to the Happy Birthday song. Sarah Rosenberg knew. She knew all three verses, as well as the words to hundreds, perhaps thousands of other songs.

Her family says she probably spent half of her days singing. As a student in New York City, Dan Rosenberg says his mother would study lyric sheets as she road the subway from Washington Heights to Brooklyn College. Broadway musicals and Big Band standards were her favorites.

Outspoken and plain speaking, Betty Pease is featured in this month's A Life Remembered.

She can be described in many ways, but Roslyn Garfield was a small town attorney, in one of the smallest of towns. To her credit, she was more interested in helping struggling artists and entangled whales than she was in taking big, pay-day cases from Boston-based developers.

People who were not born on the Cape and Islands but somehow or other come to live here, are often called "washashores." But Beth Schwarzman didn't call herself that. She moved here from California with her young family, but she was no washashore.

When Nancy Boyd Lennon was a teenager, she used to hide when a certain young man came to visit her father, John Boyd.
 
Lennon said she and her two sisters were young and immature, and they didn't want to interact with this boy, who was something of a social outcast. He certainly wasn't one of the self-assured, athletic guys her father typically coached at the nearby high school. But this young man would ride his one-speed bicycle some 10 miles to sit with Boyd and listen to old 78 records of the Big Bands of the 30s and 40s.

Daniel Gould built boats. He built telescopes and bicycles. He carved signs and bird decoys. And he crafted musical instruments of all kinds. But mostly he built boats in Arey's Pond boat yard near Pleasant Bay in Orleans.