Boyard+Rowe


 * BOYARD ROWE**

My year at PSR 1956-57 was my only year at PSR. It was a year during which I had to deal with some personal issues. Since I left PSR at the end of that first year, I lost my Selective Service exemption, had trouble finding a full-time job but through a friend got hired in the display department at Sterling Furniture Company in San Francisco as a “floorboy”. I was drafted in November, but got deferred. During my three years at Sterling Furniture I got promoted to Assistant Buyer and then Associate Buyer. The company went belly up so I went to work for Jackson Furniture Company in Oakland, moved on to Breuner’s and finally to Rhodes Department Store as Furniture Buyer. In July 1967 Rhodes promoted me to Home Furnishings Merchandise Manager of its Concord store, a job with a nice increase in salary but it was a job I didn’t really want.

The same day Rhodes offered me the promotion I got a phone call from Browne Barr, senior minister at First Congregational Berkeley (where I had attended since 1956 and had joined in 1960) asking me to come and talk to him about a new job at the church, that of Business Administrator. Since I had been active at FCCB and was chair of the Board of Adult Ministries at the time of Browne’s call, this seemed like perhaps the “call” I had been waiting for. I began the job at the end of August in 1967 and stayed for 21 years.

I met my future wife Anne in a bible study group for single young adults at FCCB in November 1961, and we were married in June 1962. We had our son John in 1964 (he lives in Albany, has a day job and is a Bay Area poet of some note), our daughter Jeanie in 1966 (she lives in Minneapolis, works with autistic kids in the schools there).

After the 21 years as Business Administrator at FCCB where a great joy was helping facilitate the Earl Lectures and Pastoral Conference each year, and where I had worked with three senior ministers and two interim ministers, I decided it was time to move on. Not finding another job in non-profit administration, I opened a Mail Boxes Etc. franchise store on Solano Avenue, just four blocks from my residence. The business prospered and was in the top 200 of the franchise’s 2500 stores when I sold it in 1995 and “retired.” (It is now The UPS Store.)

Since then I have tried my hand at volunteering. I went back to FCCB to help with bookkeeping, photocopying and editing the weekly newsletter, but found I had bitten off more than I wanted to chew. Coming back after 10 years, I found the changes since I had left in 1988 hard to adjust to. So I did volunteer stints at the Berkeley Public Library, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Aurora Theatre Company in Berkeley where I've volunteered since 2002.

I have managed to do some European travel (England, Holland, France, Italy, Belgium). I love art museums, visit the Bay Area ones regularly, have been to museums in Southern California, Montana, Nevada, Colorado, Minnesota, New York, and Canada. Two of my favorite artists are Johannes Vermeer (whose 36 or 37 paintings are in museums around the world) and horse sculptor Deborah Butterfield, who lives in Bozeman, Montana. She has horses (mainly cast bronze and found metal) in museums, sculpture gardens and private collections all over the United States.

My wife and I have been Berkeley Repertory Theatre subscribers since 1970, we subscribe to Aurora Theatre now as well as Central Works Theatre Ensemble. I occasionally get to Shotgun Players in Berkeley, ACT in San Francisco, and the Guthrie in Minneapolis when I am visiting Jeanie.