Look and Listen

Biography

David Bowles, a native of Austin, Texas, lives in San Antonio with his best friend and constant companion Lulubelle, a yellow Lab. He grew up reading about history and touring the many museums, libraries, and state buildings of Austin. He enjoyed history and Vocational Agriculture to the detriment of his other studies, and he won many awards for animals he raised and exhibited for 4H and Future Farmers of America. After high school and a stint in the US Navy, he went to work for a wine and liquor distributor in San Antonio, Texas, later receiving a promotion that moved him to Dallas. After a 23-year career with the company, he returned to San Antonio in 1990 to establish dabow-inc®, a business that processed returned checks for merchants and financial institutions. He later added credit cards and ATM machines to the products and services for brick-and-mortar companies, home-based businesses, and online merchants. By 1994 the company had grown to 20 employees. David has always been active in community affairs, serving on numerous boards and commissions. A founding member and past president of The Business Crime Council of South Texas, a business group organized to reduce crime in South Texas, he also served as one of the first civilians on the San Antonio Police Review Board. A member of numerous business organizations, David speaks on crime prevention and conducts seminars on check and credit card fraud. He was selected Business Leader of the year in 1994 by his peers at the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce and was appointed by Congressman Lamar Smith to the White House Conference on Small Business in 1995. He started writing stories of his family to ensure that his son, daughter, and three grandchildren had accurate records of the family history. However, while the original versions, written in narrative textbook style, did maintain the records, they didn’t maintain the interest of the readers. So he used his imagination and creativity to fill in the gaps of what might have happened when the details weren’t available. He enjoys sharing what he learned from his research and speaks to schools, churches, and other organizations on topics relating to the Revolutionary War and researching and preserving family history.

Inspiration

As a young boy, I loved to hear about my grandparents and great grandparents. My parents, aunts, and uncles told wonderful stories and painted vivid pictures of every event. I spent my childhood summers at the ranch belonging to my Uncle Lester and Aunt Izola Bowles near Marble Falls, Texas. Aunt Izola was a great cook, and I always gained a few pounds during my summer visits. She and Uncle Lester tended to my elderly grandfather John W. Bowles for many years until his death. Aunt Izola spent the days with Granddad while Uncle Lester worked cattle or tended to the many details of running a ranch. She spent hours listening to her father-in-law’s family stories and could recite them better than her husband or any of his siblings. In the evenings, we sat on the front porch. Sometimes, my cousins and I took turns cranking the handle of the old-fashioned ice cream maker. Even if we had homemade peach ice cream, we ate the peaches picked fresh from her orchard as Uncle Lester or Aunt Izola told tales of long ago. Those stories intrigued me because they really happened — and they happened to people that were connected to me. I wanted to know more about my ancestors and developed an early interest in history, the only subject I ever excelled in. As an adult, I interviewed my father and uncles and started researching the family history. But family history always took second place to motorcycle trips. I loved to take vacations on my Gold Wing Touring Motorcycle and had many great adventures on the open road. Then in October 1998, a motorcycle accident changed my life. After my close call with death, I wanted to ensure that the family history was passed down to my children and grandchildren. With time on my hands during the three-year recovery from the accident, I replaced my motorcycle-riding hobby with a new avocation: writing stories of my family. I found more time to write when my daughter, who has been diabetic since childhood, underwent a pancreas transplant. I carried my laptop to the hospital and typed my stories sitting in the lobby waiting through her surgery. To make these stories as exciting to my readers as the stories told by the previous generations of my family were to me, I created dialogue and scenes to fill in the gaps in history. While remaining faithful to known facts, The Westward Sagas are written as fiction to add true life drama to the tales from colonial days to the settlement of the West.