Atlanta native Billy Bowles was a journalist with a penchant for chasing hard news stories. He was well-known in Detroit, where he spent much of his career, for his no-nonsense approach to reporting.
Over several decades, Bowles was an award-winning journalist who covered the Vietnam War and other high-profile stories.
Bowles, a former Detroit Free Press journalist, died Aug. 6 at his home in Georgia, which he had returned to in retirement. He was 83.
Scott Bowles, a USA TODAY journalist and Billy Bowles’ son, said his father was a classic reporter who never shied from asking tough questions.
“Once, he interviewed a preacher accused of beating a kid until he died, and he let me come along,” Scott Bowles said. “He let me see the real world and didn’t try to sugarcoat it. Dad, he was my journalism school. Dad was my teacher. I watched him write and gained a love of it.”
Born in Atlanta and a graduate of the University of Georgia, Bowles began his career in the South, working for the Associated Press and the Charleston News and Courier in South Carolina. There, he won the Ernie Pyle Award in 1966 for his coverage of the Vietnam War.
He joined the Free Press in 1971 as a general assignment reporter covering everything from crime to news features. He later became the Free Press’ Southern correspondent before leaving in 1988. Harry Cook, a former religion reporter and columnist at the Free Press, recalled the mountain of notebooks Bowles had on his desk.
Cook said he was always astonished by the way Bowles pieced stories together. Shannon Mohr, a young woman whose 1980 death was initially believed to be an accident, was later found to be a homicide victim, largely because of Bowles’ reporting.
The story was turned into a TV movie, and Bowles’ coverage led to the arrest of Mohr’s husband.
“He spent most of seven years gathering a set of unlikely facts,” Cook said. “It started out as a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle and he toiled over it until a picture emerged. He was the standard for all of us in terms of his persistence and his writing. … Billy, he sort of just worked in the trenches. He was the real thing.”
Longtime Free Press journalist Bill McGraw said he learned a lot from Bowles as a young reporter.
“He was an amazing reporter,” McGraw said. “Really, perhaps the most amazing reporter I ever met in my career. … He really had a nose for news and was able to convey it in a very vivid way.”
Scott Bowles said he’ll always cherish the lessons he learned from his father.
“He told me the only job he could possibly ever do was be a reporter,” he said. “Dad believed the little man deserved a voice. Put him on a story with the working class and Dad was in his element. He just lived for it.”
In addition to his son Scott, Bowles is survived by his wife Faye of Atlanta; son Mark and daughter Caroline.
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