Editor’s Note: This profile of Augustine J. Bowe has been adapted from an article Illinois Appellate Court Justice Michael B. Hyman originally wrote for Chicago Lawyer magazine. It paints a portrait of Gus Bowe, the poet, while also noting his other lives as a distinguished lawyer, civic leader and Cook County Presiding Judge. Justice Hyman, as was Gus Bowe, is also a former President of the Chicago Bar Association. Columnist Mike Royko opined on Gus Bowe’s death that Chicago was already “duller.” In Justice Hyman’s remembrance, written 55 years after Judge Bowe’s death in 1966, Gus Bowe is recalled as a man who was decent, competent, and endowed with a highly refined common sense, and perceived as a person of, “absolute integrity, manifest kindness, and fastidiousness in dress and manners.”
