The Rev. Richard Bowyer: Eternally faithful, forever present

FAIRMONT - He heard the rumble, felt it, from behind the wheel.

Right before he met the first truck laden with limestone, coming the other way.

Actually, that first truck was part of a caravan of trucks, laden with limestone, coming the other way.

The limestone was going to be used to seal Consolidation Coal Co.'s No. 9 Mine.

Forever.

That's what the Rev. Richard Bowyer was told on Nov. 27, 1968, the day before Thanksgiving.

The day before 78 households across Farmington and northern Marion County would have an empty seat at 78 tables for dinner.

If there was a meal at all.

Just a week earlier, at 5:30 a.m. on a chilly Nov. 20, said mine at Farmington was roiled by an explosion.

Then another, and another, and another ... not unlike that procession of trucks going the other way.

A clerk finishing up his overnight shift at a motel 20 miles down the road in Fairmont felt the whump from that first blast - like an open palm smacking a hard surface - as it rattled the ink pens and paper clips in that old coffee mug on his desk.

It was that powerful, and that pronounced, from that far away and that far underground.

Officials and those leading the rescue effort were gray with resignation when they told the clergyman about those trucks to come, a week after the horror.

At the time, 59 miners were known fatalities. They either died in the explosions outright or succumbed to deadly gases that built up in the mine, in the ensuing hours.

Others, wrenchingly, were unaccounted for, and 19 remain entombed in the mine to this day.

The rescue effort was off, Bowyer was told.

So was the recovery effort.

It was just too dangerous to keep going, those officials said.

"This has to be confidential," they said, as their eyes locked on with dread awe.

Bowyer, meanwhile, had been there with the families of the miners since the beginning, when the black smoke first tore from the mine like Hell's chimney.

He was headed back to Fairmont to regroup and process what he had just been told. The trucks were enroute to Farmington.

As U.S. 250 unspooled, so did the thought-prayer in his head: I'm not leaving. I'll be there as long as they want me and need me to be there.

ON BECOMING A SHEPHERD

Bowyer, 91, died last week.

Calling hours are from noon-4 p.m. today at Domico Funeral Home in Fairmont. Services will follow at 6 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church.

He was born in Huntington and did his first official preaching in his hometown in 1953, while still in high school.

After graduating from Marshall, he was off to Duke Divinity School in North Carolina, where he earned a master's degree in 1968, on top of doing ministerial work in Fairmont.

Bowyer arrived here six years earlier to assume the role of campus minister for the Wesley Foundation of then Fairmont State College.

Working on his graduate degree in divinity studies put him on the road from the Mountain State to the Tar Heel State a lot, where he kept busy in the civil rights cause.

Bowyer was down South when news crackled across his car radio that Dr. Martin Luther King had been killed by an assassin's bullet in Memphis.

He spent his career here mainly preaching at Black churches across Fairmont, but his ministry wasn't just about Bible study on Wednesday night and the big sermon on Sunday morning.

Call it a life of being there for as long as he was wanted and needed.

Bowyer had his coal mining bona fides.

He served on the board of directors of the Fairmont Clinic, which provided medical care for miners and their loved ones.

For experience to go with his empathy, he had ventured beneath the surface at the Farmington mine for a tour - just three months before the disaster.

Boyers' ministry over the years also delivered him to an Indian reservation in North Carolina and to churches and community centers across Belfast, Northern Ireland, right after the Troubles.

He tended to home just as hard as he worked.

Survivors include his wife, three grown children and several grandchildren. His church family, too.

(NOT) GOING IT ALONE

The latter of which was quite happy to see him on Sept. 17, 2023.

He delivered the guest sermon that Sunday morning at Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist, a predominately Black church which was the site of one of his first local messages of faith shortly after his arrival in Fairmont more than 60 years prior.

"Well, I'm back," he grinned, to applause and shouts of "Amen!"

Then, he got down to business.

Sure, he said: These are divisive days.

Hope is scarce, it seems.

Kind of looks like our Earth is teetering on the end times, doesn't it?

Except, he said, faith endures.

And people - when left to their own devices, he preached - can always manage to do unto others, in prayerful, meaningful ways.

For as long as we're wanted and needed, he said.