Biography
Born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, the son and grandson of medical doctors, Stowers graduated from Kemper Military School in Boonville, Missouri. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Missouri, where he also completed a two-year degree in medicine. He joined the Army Air Corps where he became a fighter pilot and gunnery instructor. Upon his return to civilian life in 1945, he enlisted in the Air Force Reserves and served as a captain until resigning his commission in 1957. Stowers entered the business world, after deciding not to become a doctor like his father and grandfather. After a stint selling mutual funds for Kansas-based Waddell & Reed, he founded a term life insurance firm – J.E. Stowers and Company.
Read more about this topic: James E. Stowers
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West [Cicily Isabel Fairfield] (1892–1983)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)