Editor’s Note: Julie Anne Bowe Thompson was the daughter of Augustine Joseph Bowe and Julia Leonie Lecour Bowe. She was born in Chicago in 1931, three years after her sibling John Edward Bowe. As a young child she often navigated Elm and Cedar Streets on Chicago’s Near North Side in a stroller John had recently outgrown.

When she mastered the art of walking, she soon began playing with John and her cousins Richard Gwinn Bowe and Raymond Bowe Walters. Dick lived in her same Elm Street apartment building with his parents William John Bowe, Sr. and Mary Gwinn Bowe. Bill Bowe was her father’s brother and Mary Bowe had been her mother’s college roommate. Ray lived on nearby Pearson Street in Streeterville and was the son of Raymond Joseph Walters and Anna Regis Bowe, her father’s sister. Their summer playground in the 1930s was in Palos Park, Illinois. Palos was a forested southwest suburb of Chicago where her parents had rented a small cottage as a family retreat in the years before World War II. Gas rationing during the war ended this idyll.

From the 1930s through the 1960s, the pictures of Julie Anne were mostly taken by my mother, Mary Bowe.  Notably, one of her pictures in 1935 catches two daughters of Anthony Canavan, Sr. and Ann Hughes: Ellen Canavan Bowe and Catherine Canavan Parish.  It’s not clear where the picture was taken, but my guess is that the Parishes were visiting the Bowes in Palos Park, given the presence of Julie Anne, John and their young cousin and the slightly woodsy backdrop.  Also weighing in the balance is the fact my father is tieless in the picture, while the Parish men in their ties might be seen as just dressed up for a family visit.  In the picture, Ellen Canavan Bowe is with her son, my father, Bill Bowe, Sr., and Catherine Canavan Parish is with her husband William Wallace Parish (-1944), a brother-in-law, and her son, William Joseph Parish (1890-1967).  In the 1970s, others mostly took the few pictures I have of Julie Anne.  They captured Julie Anne at home in Arlington Heights and at Bowe, Lynch and Casey weddings in Chicago and Cary, Illinois.