Carol Dowsett grew up in Occupied Japan with her military family, but about every four years, they came home to stay at her grandparent’s house in The Dalles, which, she said, was “my vision of America.”
So when she saw an opening for a principal job here, Dowsett jumped at the chance, and relocated here from Texas to become principal at Colonel Wright Elementary, replacing Sharon Bonderud, who retired.
Dowsett’s uncle, now a 75-year-old missionary in Kenya, went to first grade at Colonel Wright.
Born in 1957 in Tokyo, Dowsett (pronounced Dawsett) was one of six children raised by her father, Dick Owen, who worked for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, and her mother, Rita (Verlanic) Owen, who taught cooking and English to local Japanese women.
“I saw the devastation after World War II, and the hatred of occupiers, [and later] the embracing of American culture,” she said. “So just seeing that through my 18 years of growing up was pretty amazing.”
She said, “There were still wrecked buildings when I was young in Tokyo from the firebombings. Gen. MacArthur had begged servicemen living in occupied Japan to please, please help Japan get on its feet, to hire locally. So we lived in this little, little tiny house but my parents were all about that. So they would hire somebody to sew for us and we had a gardener and we had a maid and a nanny.”
American Gen. Douglas MacArthur oversaw the Allied occupation of post-war Japan.
Giving locals jobs helped them “get back on their feet again. Some of them became quite wealthy,” she said.
“Dad always said, ‘We’re here to make this country better.’”
Her dad was head of circulation for Stars and Stripes, but his “paperboys” flew a fleet of nine planes, delivering the newspaper to war-torn areas of the world. After his two years of military service ended, he kept his job as a civilian, working 27 years in all for Stars and Stripes. Then Dowsett’s parents spent another 19 years in Japan as missionaries.
When Dowsett was very young, she met soldiers with seriously burned and broken bodies. “I suppose I had a more serious upbringing than a lot of kids, as far as the international focus goes.”
Her dad subscribed to multiple newspapers and magazines, and the kids were expected to read them right along with him.
She can still remember what dress she was wearing when, as a child of about six, she and her family were locked down in a hotel as an angry crowd of Japanese citizens marched by, yelling anti-American slogans and rattling the hotel gates.
She dislikes the term “Yankee” as a descriptor for Americans. “In almost every connotation except ‘I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy,’ I’ve seen it used in a derogatory way, much as Americans were taught to say derogatory things toward the Japanese” during the war.
She said, “We were taught to be incredibly respectful of the Japanese people and love them but at the same time understand there was a contingent of Japanese who did not welcome an occupying force.”
About every four years growing up, Dowsett’s family came home to The Dalles for a visit with her grandparents, Pink and Ethyl Owen. She can remember walking and riding her bike up and down 10th Street, where her grandparents then lived, and her dad going to the Maier and Krier men’s clothing store downtown to get all of his wardrobe needs met for another four-year stretch in Japan before he’d be back home again.
After she graduated from high school in Japan, Dowsett’s gift from her father, the same he gave all his children, was a one-way plane ticket, luggage, and the first year of college paid for. She went to Biola University in La Mirada, Calif.
It was around the same time that South Vietnam fell to the Communist North. Her dad used the nine airplanes that were part of his circulation department and diverted them to South Vietnam to get as many people out as he could. “But it was a difficult thing for him, realizing he was leaving people behind in the killing fields.”
During her youth in Japan, she doesn’t recall local observances on the days that the nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, helping bring an end to World War II. “But my dad had people working for him that were still getting burns treated in the ‘70s. The devastation was just incredible. And we’re seeing that with our own military people and the generational harm they’ve had from Agent Orange or the burning fields and toxicity of the Middle East.”
Her husband, Phillip Dowsett, wrote a book, “And the Red Bird Sings,” about his service in Vietnam as part of the first brown water navy, the Mobile Riverine Force. “They actually took the Army into different places in Vietnam along the waterways.”
He bathed in water that had been doused with the defoliant Agent Orange, she said. Phillip has experienced serious health repercussions as a result.
College for Dowsett was a huge culture shock. She found herself to be a much more serious and focused student than her raised-in-America counterparts. She felt a lot of her fellow students “didn’t have that same intense desire to learn, and learn as much as I could. It seemed like there was that need to do so, to learn as much as I could, and not to waste a gift that was given to me.”
She not only knows Japanese but said it was her first language, having learned it from her Japanese nannies. She spoke with a mishmash of English and Japanese for years until she got to college, and her students who had Spanish as a first language could very much relate to that, she said.
She wouldn’t say she’s fluent anymore, but she still understands it well.
In college she started off as a nursing major, “but my mother always said she knew I would become a teacher because I was so bossy,” she said with a hearty laugh. “And so I did, I became an English teacher.”
She went back to school for a master’s degree in special education. “Then I discovered that I loved elementary, so I got my degree in elementary ed. And I taught fourth and fifth grade. And loved that, and from there I was pulled reluctantly out of the classroom in about 2008 to become an administrator. I love to teach. I think every admin should go back and teach every four years or so; they need to do that so they know what it’s like to be in the classroom.”
Once she had her administrator’s license, she stayed at her central Oregon school at the time, Northlake School, until 2013, and then worked as an administrator at St. Helens Middle School for four years.
Two years ago, her family moved down to Texas so her husband could get medical help, and she went back to the classroom and taught two years in eighth grade.
Now, as she gets settled in at Colonel Wright, she said the staff is “like family.”
The dull gray breezeway by the office has been painted a bright array of colors, and Dowsett is instilling a sense of service—and bringing some of what she grew up with as a student in Japan—by having students help clean up the tables in the cafeteria.
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