Ken Towery: A lifelong patriot
Tuesday: The “Chow Dipper” survives.
Wednesday: Towery returns to Texas, starts a family, wins the Pulitzer Prize.
Thursday: Mr. Towery goes to Washington.
Friday: Back in Texas.
Ken Towery returned to Texas in the late 1970s to work for the University of Texas system, but not for long. Senator Tower convinced him to help with what became his final U.S. Senate campaign in 1978. Although Tower left the Senate in 1985, he served many presidential appointments before he died in a plane crash in 1991.
Towery continued to work as a political consultant in Austin and returned to his love for newspapering with the purchase of the West Texas weeklies, the Floyd County Hesperian, the Lockney Beacon and the Crosby County News.
His daughter Alice Towery Gilroy had graduated with a degree in criminal justice and worked in law enforcement at Rice University in Houston for nine years. She was looking for a change when her father asked her to work for his West Texas newspapers, that were merged.
After working as a reporter, Towery wanted her to become editor.
“This is how I learned to run the newspaper. Every day I’d get the mail and sit down and call my dad. I’d go through the mail and the press releases.”
Towery would tell her what to keep and what to throw away. She’d fax him the major stories and he would edit them, helping her and the reporters understand his news judgment.
“Little by little I didn’t have so much piled up on my desk and I didn’t have to call him every day. But he was thrilled when I would call him.
Floyd County ended up having quite a few big stories,” Gilroy said.
The staff who stayed were happy her dad was involved. She and her staff were involved with the Panhandle Press Association and won many awards, she said.
But like newspapers everywhere, especially small-town newspapers, advertising revenue dried up and Gilroy made the decision to sell.
She and her husband had worked in West Texas for more than 20 years. Lennie Gilroy served the Floyd County Sheriff’s Office and became police chief in Lockney, before he became a Floyd County commissioner. He also helped build ads, compose pages and deliver the newspaper. Their son Brandon graduated from Lockney High School in 2005.
Pulse of America
Towery also kept a hand in politics, working for people running for state and congressional seats.
“He was very instrumental in the Larry Combest and Mac Thornberry races,” for Congress, Gilroy said.
He also helped out with a well-known Lubbock-based poll.
The late Jane Anne Stinnett and Lisa Nowlin worked with Towery when they did the Pulse of America poll for their Southwest Research Associates.
Their firm did surveys and polling for political candidates.
The name loosely came from former president George H.W. Bush, who had mentioned something about Lubbock then representing the pulse of the country.
Towery wrote survey questions which surveyed people in Lubbock and 15 surrounding counties. At the time, Nowlin said, that area mirrored the demographics of the United States.
It was also a time people answered their phones and were happy to participate in a survey, she said.
“Ken took questions deeper,” said Nowlin, who lives in Slaton.
His questions were not loaded and used a sliding scale with questions to make sure they accurately measured how passionate a respondent felt about a question, she said.
“He was the master guru,” Nowlin said, adding Towery said if a survey didn’t get the right answer it was a disservice and had no integrity. The survey must provide accurate information no matter what happens.
One of their surveys showed a majority of Lubbock and surrounding counties thought abortion should be between a woman and her doctor. They sent the survey to the Austin American-Statesman and the newspaper did a story.
“He was a giant, a legend, a normal guy – two fingers of whiskey, never assuming. A great dad and husband,” Nowlin said, commenting how impressed she was with Towery’s intellect.
He was a giant, a legend, a normal guy – two fingers of whiskey, never assuming. A great dad and husband.
Lisa nowlin
See the other stories in our series on Ken Towery
Back to Austin
Gilroy returned to Austin to help her parents as they were getting older in 2008. She and her husband then worked with law enforcement for many years at St. Edwards University in Austin. Now the couple helps take care of their grandchildren.
Athena Towery, Gilroy’s niece, is working to format Towery’s memoir, “The Chow Dipper,” so it’s accessible digitally, but Gilroy doesn’t have an estimate of when it could be available.
Ken and Louise Towery passed away in May and December of 2016 and are buried in the Texas State Cemetery.
“It was a great honor,” Gilroy says. She occasionally visits their graves and remembers one Memorial Day when Boy Scouts were placing American flags on the graves.
“They were so sweet and made a point to come up to me and ask about the man they were honoring with a flag. I tried to keep it together and told them as much as I could. They were touched and so was their leader,” she said.
Read an excerpt from “The Chow Dipper” on how Ken Towery says his life worked out.
“I doubt many lives have ever worked out exactly as planned or anticipated, even in the broadest terms. This has been one of those lives that did not work out exactly as planned or even as anticipated. It has been a life in which some prayers were answered in ways I hoped, for which we give thanks, and in which some were not, for which we also give thanks. We have walked where we never thought to walk. “
