Emile Jean (Jeanne) Bowman

Emile Jean (Jeanne) Bowman of Laurens, SC, quietly passed away on March 22, 2023 with her husband Jim and son John by her side.
Jeanne was born on May 20, 1940 to Emile Louise and Clifford Cecil Crane in Bristol, Tennessee. She grew up in a loving household in Richmond, VA with her teasing younger brothers Robert and Donald. After she graduated in 1958 from Thomas Jefferson High School in Richmond, VA, she spent one year at Columbia Bible College. She moved to Norfolk, VA and graduated from Norfolk General Hospital’s School of Nursing as a registered nurse in 1962 (while playing center on the hospital’s women basketball team and driving the team’s bus to games).
In 1962, Jeanne met James Edward Bowman, Jr. in Norfolk, VA and they were married in 1963. They lived with their sons Edward, John and Stephen in Clinton, NC, Rocky Mount, NC and Hendersonville, NC before finally moving to the Anderson/Laurens area of South Carolina to be near John.
Jeanne was an OB/GYN nurse and her professional career focused educating the public and educating her peers on improvement that could be made in natural childbirth. She was an early adopter of Lamaze and became the first ASPO certified Lamaze instructor in 1980 in Nash General Hospital in Rocky Mount. Jeanne was the Eastern NC Chapter of NAACOG Member of the Year (1983) and American College of Childbirth Educators Fellow (1992).
Deciding to look for a new challenge after seeing Eddie graduate college, Jeanne went back to college to become a health educator. She attended UNC-Asheville which by coincidence was where her middle son John was a student. While at school they shared some of the same classes, though not taken at the same time. Additionally, they shared some of the same friends, unbeknownst to each other. Her favorite class was an art class. Painting and artistic perception opened up new worlds for her creative mind to venture. She transferred to UNC- Charlotte to receive her BA in Nursing. Afterwards, she went to the University of South Carolina and received a Master’s in Public Health in 1992.
Jeanne was an artist and filled our houses with paintings and crafts and supported her sons forays in the arts. An unexpected art form she found along the way was clowning; she attended clown school and developed her alter-ego “Jena the Clown”. She joined the Health Adventures Clown troupe that would march in town parades and attend festivities such as Hendersonville’s Apple Festival.
Jeanne was sadly predeceased by Stephen Bowman in 2014 and is survived by Jim, Eddie, John, Stephen’s wife Jeannette and her two brothers Bob and Don.
A time of remembrance will be held at the Pretty Place Chapel in Cleveland, SC on August 12, 2023 at 1:00 PM.

Gray Funeral Home of Laurens is assisting the Bowman family with arrangements.