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Bar News - November 7, 2003 Reminiscences from Judge Hugh H. Bownes Editor's note: On Nov. 5 at Yale Medical Center, Judge Hugh H. Bownes died of complications resulting from a stroke. Before he died, the Bar News had decided to publish this article, a reprint of an interview that appeared in the Fall 2003 issue of The Short Circuit, a quarterly publication of the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The article is reprinted with permission. Judge Hugh Bownes, who was the first NH judge to serve on the First Circuit Court, was appointed to the court by then-President Jimmy Carter in 1977. Bownes went on senior status in January of 1990, and retired from the court Sept. 1, 2003. ---------------------------------FROM HUMBLE BEGINNINGS as a Bronx-bred New Yorker to his golden years as a senior judge on the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and through all the trials and triumphs in between, Hugh H. Bownes seems never to have lost his sense of humor, nor the distinct dialect of his native city. His joviality and his accent are clearly audible in a tape-recorded interview with two senior COA colleagues, Frank M. Coffin and Levin H. Campbell, which describes the full and rewarding life led by the judge, now 83. What emerges even more pronouncedly from a transcript of the interview is an account of Bownes' numerous achievements - as a scholarship student at Columbia University, a Marine in World War II, a country lawyer in New Hampshire and finally a federal appellate judge in Boston, a post from which he officially retired on Sept. 1, 2003. The transcript and audiotape are preserved in an archives room in the Boston-based circuit library as part of an ongoing oral history project launched by Bownes, Campbell and Coffin. The judges' three-way conversation begins with Bownes speaking of a "pleasant" boyhood lived within 10 minutes of New York City's Van Cortland Park, where "I spent many happy hours...biking, fishing and learning how to play baseball." His father, he recalls, had "a good job" as a printer in the Times Square area, until 1930, when the Great Depression worked its will on Hugh Bownes' job and the employment of millions of others. In 1933, as her son was approaching graduation from grammar school with a Distinguished Scholar Award, Margaret Bownes learned that the Horace Mann School for Boys, a private school in nearby Riverdale, N.Y., was offering scholarship assistance to those who needed it. "I had one of my many lucky breaks," Bownes says of his acceptance to the school on a full scholarship. Columbia University, where he would earn a bachelor's degree cum laude in history in June 1941, also granted him financial aid, which he supplemented with a job delivering groceries for an A&P store in the Bronx. He would return to Columbia in 1945 for his law degree, but not before he served in the Marines, rising from boot-camp ranks in Parris Island, SC, through officer's training in Quantico, Va., and then to combat missions overseas, for which he eventually was awarded a Silver Star and a Purple Heart. While posted in Guam, as executive officer of his company, Bownes was struck by enemy machine-gunfire and was bleeding so profusely from a wound to his femoral artery that his fellow Marines did not expect him to live through the night. He was transported to a hospital 3,000 miles south of Guam in the South Pacific where doctors managed to save his leg from amputation and returned him to the States in November 1944. He recuperated for several months in St. Albans Hospital on Long Island, NY, and 10 months later was back on the Columbia campus as a first-year law student on a G.I. Bill of Rights scholarship. After graduation, Bownes and his wife, Irja Martikainen who was from Maine, took their leave of New York and headed for New England. They settled in Laconia, where he joined a local law firm and opened a trial practice in 1948. The couple's daughter, Barbara, had been born in 1946, while her father was in law school; twin sons rounded out the family in 1949. By the 1960s, Bownes' work included more than just his law practice. "We want to learn a little bit about your foray into politics," Coffin is heard telling Bownes, who goes on to relate that he was a Laconia city councilor for two terms, mayor for one term and a member of the Democratic National Committee. The lawyer had also become a NH Superior Court judge, but after only one and a half years on that bench, Bownes was headed for a seat on the U.S. District Court for New Hampshire. The sole judge on the court, Aloysius J. Connor, died suddenly in March 1968. In August 1968, then-President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Bownes to fill the U.S.D.C. vacancy. "One of the write-ups about you had you handling over 450 cases, being the ninth busiest district judge in the country," Coffin notes, to which Bownes responds, with characteristic modesty: "Well, that may be so. That's why they decided to appoint some more district judges, I guess." Less than 10 years later, Court of Appeals Judge Edward McEntee died, creating a vacancy on that court. Bownes contacted then-U.S. Sen. Thomas J. McIntyre (D-NH) and the judicial nomination wheels began their inexorable grind. The appointment, by President Jimmy Carter, took effect Oct. 31, 1977, "and the best years of my life began," Bownes says. "I don't know whether I was trick or treat, but I've enjoyed it very much." The judges continue their lively discussion, reminiscing about what Bownes refers to as "the halcyon days" when the three of them and Senior Judge Bailey Aldrich (who died in September 2002) constituted the entire Court of Appeals. The exchange ends with Bownes remarking that "one of the great things that happened to me was my marriage to Mary [Davis] on July 12, 1992." Irja Bownes had died in January 1991 after a long battle with cancer. A former law clerk to Bownes who was widowed in 1989, Davis, the judge acknowledges, "liked my judicial opinions, my judicial attitude, but she didn't like me very much as a boss." "She thought she could correct that," Coffin jokes. "Yes," Bownes replies, "and she's been doing a good job at it.... I've got to say I began my golden years with my marriage to Mary. I'm very lucky." The couple now resides in Connecticut, on Long Island Sound. "It's a beautiful home, and we both love it," he says, concluding, "We're going to stay there." The New Hampshire Bar Foundation has also recorded Judge Bownes' recollections as part of its oral history project. For information on that interview, contact Angela Yanski at 224-6942 or ayanski@nhbar.org.
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