To promote his new book “Real Winners Don’t Quit,” Joe Bowen has been bicycling and stilt walking to the capital for Saturday’s Kentucky Book Fair at the Frankfort Convention Center.
He started Monday at his home in Powell County near Natural Bridge State Park and plans to arrive late this afternoon.
The trip to Frankfort is a 100-meter sprint compared to his long, winding cross-country cycling and stilt walking journeys through America over the past four decades.
“This is kind of a celebration lap,” says 66-year-old Bowen.
In 1967 Bowen began a bicycle journey to discover America for himself. At the time, there had been crossings of America on a bicycle, but it was unheard of to travel 14,000 miles in 16 months on a bike.
Bowen was inspired by Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck’s 1962 book, “Travels With Charley.” At age 60, Steinbeck set out in search of America with his French poodle, Charley. They traveled in a truck/camper named for Don Quixote’s horse, Rocinante.
On a 10-speed royal blue Schwinn Supersport named Rocinante, Bowen left Lompoc, Calif., after getting out of the U.S. Air Force, with $43 in his pocket.
Whenever he ran out of money, he worked a few days painting a house, putting up hay on a farm, cutting firewood or similar chores.
In 1980 Joe wanted to raise money for his favorite charity, the Muscular Dystrophy Association. With help from fellow Jaycees, Joe’s 3,008-mile stilt walk across America put him in the Guinness Book of World Records while raising more than $100,000 for MDA.
Then in 2005 at age 62 he started another 14,000-mile journey through North America, following closely the same route he took in 1967.
Before his second departure then-Gov. Ernie Fletcher named Bowen the first Kentucky Unbridled Spirit recipient.
Former state Commerce Cabinet Secretary Jim Host, who met Bowen shortly before his second cross-country cycling trip, said this week he hopes Bowen’s book is a hit at the Book Fair because “people need to know what a great Kentuckian he is.”
“Joe is the most unbelievable Kentuckian I think I have ever met,” Host said. “I love the guy. He’s as Kentuckian as you can get.”
On the second cross-country cycling trip, Bowen carried a computer to connect with thousands of students in Eastern Kentucky, as well as others around America.
His online classroom enabled students to vicariously travel with him and learn about the interesting people and places he visited.
Former Gov. Martha Layne Collins wrote the foreword to “Real Winners Don’t Quit,” and will be on hand for the signing. Some of Bowen’s descriptions include:
>Joe’s Shack, a quail brooder house that became Joe’s home – at the encouragement of his mother – near the family residence. His father was an abusive alcoholic and at age 11, “I had become his punching bag … I could eat in the house with the family, but my clothes, bed and personal stuff would be in the brooder house.
“It was in Joe’s Shack where I became free to dream and create and become a world adventurer and traveler. It was in that Shack that I dreamed of seeing America for myself. It was in that Shack that I did some of my best writing.”
>Beuford and Emmuelle Gray, a black couple in Little Rock, Ark., who gave him a motel room for $2 to protect him from a turbulent, burning town just a few nights after Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968.
>A Navajo family he met in New Mexico. They liked his down-to-earth genuineness because the next Christmas he received a special gift from his Navajo friends.
“Woven into the middle of the intricate blanket, which must have taken weeks to make, was my name, JOE,” he writes. “It became the most prized gift of the trip.”
>A wreck scene near Delta, Colo., on his second cycling trip. An ambulance zoomed past him and soon he saw medics working frantically on a 12-year-old girl, who was in critical condition. Her mother was dead.
They had been riding their bicycles in the emergency lane of a four-lane road. A witness told Joe a man had driven into the emergency lane and struck them.
When Joe asked what happened, a woman pointed to a man on his knees behind a white car. “You see that SOB?” she said. “He drove right over the top of them. I was following him and I saw him do it.”
>Judy Shircliffe, a close friend from Taylorsville. Her words – inscribed on a large bronze plaque after his second 14,000-mile bicycle ride – describe Joe.
It reads, in part, “Joe has made many contributions over the years, most of which started with others saying it couldn’t be done.
“Never a wealthy man, Joe once said he has lived the life of a rich man without the burden of money. He is an ‘average Joe’ made unique by believing in the power within himself and of the human spirit.”
Collins wrote in the foreword of Bowen’s love for Kentucky. “Deeply concerned with helping others, he has always worked to make contributions to Kentucky’s communities and environs that help to improve our quality of life … He has committed himself to educate children about the many wonderful attractions across our nation.”
A retired construction foreman, Joe has three daughters and has raised more than $600,000 for charities over the years.
He has carried the Olympic Torch twice – for the 1996 summer games and the 2002 winter games.
In 1986 Joe received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor along with Muhammad Ali, Gregory Peck, John Denver and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
Today Joe and his wife, Barbara, live in a 2,600 square-foot home they built in the woods from lumber and other materials they recycled for 10 years from 150-year-old houses that had been abandoned and given to Joe.
They have five children. The book is dedicated to their 13 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
At 66, Joe still has a childlike fascination for playing outside, traveling and connecting with America and its people. He believes he’ll still be riding his bicycle in his 90s.
The Kentucky Book Fair at the Frankfort Convention Center Saturday
TIME: 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m.
ADMISSION: Free
SALE TERMS: Cash, checks, all major credit cards.
TOTAL AUTHORS: 210
TOTAL TITLES: 500
FEATURED AUTHORS: George McGovern, Phyllis George, Tori Murden, Allan Eckert, James Reston Jr., Marcia Thornton Jones, Silas House, Karen Robards, David Dick, George Ella Lyon
CANCELLATIONS: Dana Canady, Byron Crawford, Ann Liberman, Holly Herrick, Alan Cornette, Robbie Robertson, Chip Tullar
ADDITIONS: Martha Layne Collins, Lucynda Koester, Tom Leach, Jim Squires