Bownes

You won't find Judge Hugh H. Bownes's name in the index to Tom Brokaw's bestseller The Greatest Generation, but it belongs there. Bownes, who died at age 83 on Wednesday, weathered the Great Depression as a teenager, fought across the Pacific as a young man, served as mayor of Laconia and bestowed justice from the state and federal bench for the balance of his exceptional life.

"Hugh epitomized all that is best in the practice of law," said Judge Norman Stahl, who sits on the United States First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, where Bownes crowned his career. "He recognized that we deal with people." Martin Gross, a Concord attorney, who picked Bownes's brain while studying for the bar exams at his father-in-law's firm — Martin, Lord, and Osman (and later Bownes) — said "he had a great affection for the little guy and a deep suspicion of the big guy."

Bownes began as a little guy, the older of two sons of Irish immigrants, in the Bronx. His brother Malcolm, who lives in Plymouth, said he was a good baseball player, but not real fast. "We were hitching a ride on the trolley, when a cop chased us. I got away, but he caught Hugh," he said. "That was his first introduction to the law."

Bownes' father was a linotype operator and a strong union man who found work hard to come by during the Depression. In the early 1930s, at twelve or thirteen, Hugh began delivering groceries for the local A & P. After attending Horace Mann School for Boys, perhaps the city's premier high school, on a scholarship, Bownes enrolled at Columbia, still delivering groceries for 40 hours a week at 40 cents an hour.

Shortly after graduating, Bownes enlisted in Marine Corps, "to fight the Japanese," said his son Ernie, teacher at Pleasant Street School. He fought at Guadalcanal and Bougainville. In the Solomon Islands he won the Silver Star for leading a reconnaissance team that was landed by submarine on an island held by the Japanese where they spent a week scouting enemy positions and strength.

During the invasion of Guam, Bownes was directing the assault wave from the surf when he was struck by a mortar round that severed a major artery and shattered his shin bones.

"If I had been hit 100 yards inland, I would have bled to death," he would recall. Instead, Bownes was rushed to a ship where, after he was given the last rites, corpsmen stanched the bleeding. He remembered Marines scrambling over the side to hit the beach stripping him of everything useful, saying he would soon be dead.

"He was only one of ten or 12 who came out of the Pacific with gas gangrene without losing his leg," Malcolm said. He spent the next three years in hospitals and at Roosevelt Hospital met and married Irja. Bownes would walk with a limp, suffer with pain and undergo treatment for the rest of his life.

Bownes returned to Columbia, to Law School. "I found him in Columbia Law School," said Arthur Nighswander, who was looking for a litigator for his firm in Laconia. "I met him at Grant's Tomb."

In 1948, Bownes came to Laconia. "I gave him the worst advice I've ever given to anyone," Nighswander recalled. "He asked me which party he should join and I told him if he wanted to get anywhere, be a Republican," he said. "The next day he told me he'd become a Democrat."

Laconia became the cradle of the modern New Hampshire Democratic Party and Bownes, said Bernard Boutin, a former mayor, "was right in the middle of it." Boutin called Bownes a "fierce democrat," who was elected to the City council in Ward 1, "the furthest thing from a democratic ward you can imagine."

Bownes, along with Boutin, Oliver Huot, and Tom McIntyre from Laconia and John King and Joe Millimet from Manchester, helped New Hampshire Democrats ride the Kennedy wave. King became the state's first Democratic governor in nearly half a century while Huot won a seat in Congress and McIntyre a seat in the Senate. Bownes served as mayor from 1963 to 1965, but failed in a bids for Country Attorney and State Senate.

Meanwhile, he was giving Republicans fits in the courtroom. Governor Hugh Gregg and Attorney General Louis Wyman, following the lead of Joe McCarthy, went looking for Communists and found Willard Uphaus's World Fellowship Camp in North Conway. When Wyman held Uphaus in contempt for refusing to name his campers, Bownes sprang to his defense. "It was not easy to represent Uphaus," said Stahl.

"Hugh was courageous," said Boutin. The case went to both the state and federal supreme courts, losing by a single vote in each.

"Bownes earned enormous respect for crossing swords with Wyman," Gross said. Gross remembered that Wyman walked away from the crash of a private plane and Bownes, on hearing the news, quipped "I guess the devil takes care of his own."

King appointed Bownes to the New Hampshire Superior Court in 1966 and two years later he was tapped for the United States District Court, an appointment that required confirmation by the United States Senate. William Loeb, the publisher of the Manchester Union-Leader who was irate at Bownes's defense of Uphaus, wired Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina Senator on the Senate Judiciary Committee, urging him to block the appointment of "this communist."

McIntyre persuaded his Republican counterpart from New Hampshire, Norris Cotton, to intervene. On learning that Bownes was a decorated combat veteran, Thurmond relented. Thanking him, Bownes told him, "Senator McIntyre has told me on more than one occasion that you are the most popular senator to come out of South Carolina, with the possible exception of John C. Calhoun." Later a puzzled McIntyre asked Bownes "when did I tell you that?"

Bownes became the lone judge — "a one man gang," said Stahl — in a federal court swamped with controversial cases. "He was a one judge court when lots of things were happening," Stahl said. "He had an enormous docket of difficult civil rights cases."

Among the most troubling, especially in light of Bownes's own military career, were those involving young men prosecuted for avoiding the draft. "I wasn't very heavy handed on sentencing," Bownes said later. In fact, he acquitted ten of thirteen alleged "draft dodgers" to appear before him, but convicted the son of his longtime Democratic ally Eugene Daniell.

During the next decade, Bownes issued a string of decisions upholding the rights of individuals against the encroachment of the state. He refused to quell a non-union strike in Newington. He allowed three of the "Chicago Seven" to speak at the University of New Hampshire (UNH). He ruled in favor of a farm boy from Pittsfield who was not allowed in school wearing jeans. He reinstated a teacher with an excellent record who was fired after "un-investigated complaints and unverified rumors" and another because the board member casting the deciding vote was absent when the vote was taken.

He ruled that the First Amendment ensured George Maynard's right to cover "Live free or Die" on his license plate. He blocked construction of I-93 through Franconia Notch, setting the stage for the two-lane parkway through the mountains.

In a series of decisions he upheld the rights of women denied welfare and Medicaid benefits, including their right to Medicaid payments for abortions. He held that a statutory rape law was unconstitutional because it applied solely to males. He said UNH could not forbid gay students from holding a dance.

By now Governor Mel Thomson, echoed by Loeb at the Union-Leader, were beside themselves, howling for Bownes to be impeached. "The only good thing about the editorials," Bownes said, "was that they always ran a picture. And the picture was about ten years younger than I actually was, so I looked good."

In one of his last opinions before joining the appellate court in Boston, Bownes responded with a 100 page decision — what one attorney called "a broad assault on the entire prison system" — ordering sweeping changes at the state prison in Concord. In his opinion he wrote that the evidence "leads this court to conclude that as a result of their incarceration at the New Hampshire State Prison, plaintiffs lose whatever useful and acceptable skills and attitudes they had before they entered prison and become entrapped in the criminal culture."

Bownes, who referred to Justice William Brennan, the celebrated liberal on the United States Supreme Court, as "Saint William," was proud to be called an "activist judge." He explained that "you felt you were doing something more than just reading a case to find precedents. You were helping somebody to get an abortion, to get better food, to get better prison conditions, to have more freedom to wear what you wanted to wear when you went to school and so forth."

In 1977 Bownes was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals, First Circuit, in Boston. Although he remained an activist judge, he admitted that "the further you get away from the action, the less activist you become." He took senior status in 1990, when it took David Souter to fill his shoes.

Once, when visiting a Boston school, a pupil asked Bownes if he was troubled by decisions he made. "Yes, I am troubled," he replied. "And I hope I continue to be troubled. Because once a judge begins to think he knows for sure what's right and wrong, he's not as a good a judge as he should be. You ought to have doubts, always. But, it doesn't stop me sleeping at night."

"Appropriately, his last case was dissent," said Stahl.

Judge Bownes is survived by his twin sons David and Ernie, both of Laconia, his daughter Barbara Ann of Walpole, Massachusetts.