Ken Towery: A lifelong patriot
Today: 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.
Introduction
When Texan Ken Towery died May 4, 2016 – on his 69th wedding anniversary – it was the coda on an amazing American life.
Towery:
- Survived three years in a horrific Japanese prison camp in World War II.
- Earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1955 for uncovering fraud in the Texas Veterans Land Board.
- Went to Washington, D.C., to work for U.S. Senator John Tower.
- Worked to fight communism through the United States Information Agency.
- Returned to Texas, publishing weekly newspapers in West Texas.
- Contributed to the Lubbock-based Pulse of America poll.
- Worked as a political consultant in Austin.
- Was inducted into the Texas Newspaper Hall of Fame in 2015.
But of all his accomplishments, Towery was most proud of his imprisoned role as “chow dipper,” saying it molded a sense of fairness he used throughout his life.
On this Memorial Day week when we remember American heroes, LubbockLights.com begins a four-part series on Towery’s patriotic life.
Going to ‘slay dragons’
Ken Towery was thrust into adulthood with World War II. He was born Roland Kenneth Towery in Mississippi before his family moved to Texas.
He entered the U.S. Army on his 18th birthday to “go slay dragons,” he wrote in his 1994 memoir.
The Great Depression made life difficult on his family’s South Texas farm and Towery wanted to help his family — six brothers, two sisters.
Historic Corregidor Island Battery (collection of large guns), primarily used during World War II.
He spent a tour at a Civilian Conservation Corps camp, then enlisted in the Army. He was assigned to the 60th Coast Artillery, Battery C. With an $11 enlistment bonus he arrived in Corregidor, Philippines, in April 1941, after traveling 22 days on the USS Republic troop transport.
The Philippines were a U.S. territory, ceded to America after the Spanish-American War in 1898.
Private Towery earned $21 a month.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was still eight months away. Towery manned the artillery on Corregidor Island, which guarded the entrance to Manila Bay.
Read excerpt from “The Chow Dipper” about what Corregidor was like.
Corregidor proved an idyllic place in peacetime. The island lay athwart the entrance to Manila Bay, only three miles from the southern shores of Bataan Peninsula and some seven of eight miles from Batangas Province to the south. Shaped somewhat like a tadpole, the deeply ravined island rose abruptly from the sea to a point some 500 feet above sea level, where it flattened out into what was called Topside. It was here that most of the troops were garrisoned and it was on the seaward perimeter of Topside that most of the giant coastal defense guns were located. Their function, should war ever come, was to keep an enemy navy from entering Manila Harbor, where, at a place called Cavite, a portion of America’s Asiatic Fleet was berthed.
Five months after Pearl Harbor – pushing the United States into World War II – Japanese forces captured Corregidor after taking Bataan and controlling the Philippines.
Promised reinforcements never arrived.
The Japanese forced the Allied troops from Bataan, across Manila Bay from Corregidor, on the infamous “Death March.”
Surrender
Towery and the soldiers who remained on the anti-aircraft batteries in Corregidor surrendered a year after he arrived. After spending time in Cabanatuan, a prison camp in the Philippines, he was shipped and marched to a Japanese prison camp in Manchuria, China, near the Siberian border, where he spent three years until Allied victory was declared. About half the prisoners died in the camp. Towery recalled weighing 87 pounds on his 5-foot, 9-inch frame during one of his many stays in sick bay.
His daughter Alice Towery Gilroy remembers the stories he told.
“There was nothing good about the Japanese prison camps. They were very cruel captors.”
The Japanese considered Americans inferior, she said.
A white man who surrendered was the lowest of the low and they had nothing but contempt for the men.
alice towery gilroy
“A white man who surrendered was the lowest of the low and they had nothing but contempt for the men.”
The Chow Dipper
The title of Towery’s memoir – “The Chow Dipper” – was a role Towery’s fellow soldiers in prison camp chose for him. He saw it as one of the greatest honors he ever achieved, even more than the Pulitzer Prize he’d win in the 1950s.
“I was chosen one way or another to be the chow dipper for our barrack. I never knew why I was chosen. Experience had taught the role of chow dipper was usually short lived and carried with it the likelihood of some controversy. It could hardly be otherwise when some men are starving,” Towery wrote.
The job was to get up early, go to the camp kitchen and pick up the rations for his barrack, usually rice or the broth from cooking rice in a bucket. And then repeat for lunch and supper.
“How does one look at a bucket of thin soup, then look at a roster of starving men and devise a system that is fair to all, or as fair as one can make it?”
What Towery did was serve his portion in his canteen cup and set it beside the bucket so every man could measure his ration against Towery’s serving. Anyone who was dissatisfied could trade for Towery’s share. Mostly it worked. Once a man, called Bama for his home state of Alabama, came back to complain he received too little compared to others. But when he measured his portion against Towery’s cup, he realized he had more.
“Bama was a good man. He was just hungry. I never had a complaint from that day forward. From that day forward … I was the chow dipper for whatever group I happened to be.”
Towery reflected he’d often wonder about how others would handle a similar situation as he advanced in government and foreign affairs. Who of the dignitaries around the table could be fair and honorable in those circumstances?
“Nothing in the secular world, apart from my family, has approached the honor of being chosen as chow dipper for starving men,” he wrote.
Nothing in the secular world, apart from my family, has approached the honor of being chosen chow dipper for starving men.
ken towery, in his book “the chow dipper”
See the other stories in our series on Ken Towery
“All of us are chow dippers. All of us, if we have a conscience must wrestle with the problem of being fair, of trying to treat others as we would like to be treated … Perhaps most of us are prisoners of something that happened in our past or an accumulation of somethings.”
A few years later when Japan was defeated, Allied forces publicly humiliated the Japanese emperor as he surrendered because of the Japanese cultural arrogance Towery witnessed, he said.
“That was at least some vindication. It was some justice, but it didn’t pay back all those years in prison.”
Towery was awarded the Purple Heart and the Presidential Unit Citation with two Oak Leaf Clusters.
