Priscilla Richardson

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Sherlock Holmes lives again in Botetourt County.

You may remember the story of Wesley Bower. As a rookie Roanoke police officer, just out of the Marines after World War II, he rescued a young boy from drowning. This took place in 1949, but Bower always wondered what happened to that boy. In telling you the story, I invited anyone who had any information to come forward with it, to solve the mystery.

The first intrepid sleuth was Fincastle's Katherine Harris.

"I got all curious over your article," Harris said. "You gave enough clues, so I looked through all my phone books but I couldn't find anybody with that name. The next day, I went to the library." There in the Fincastle library, Harris found the second intrepid sleuth, Rena Worthen.

"She looked up some people on ancestry.com," Harris continued. Worthen gave her names from Florida, New Jersey and Maryland. "I started to file it away, but I just love to do stuff like that; you never know what will come of it. I came home and wrote a letter to five of them. Then one afternoon, the phone rang and this man was laughing. It was James Earl Palmiter. 'You found me,' he said. He'd told his wife a few years ago about falling in the pond, so when he opened the envelope, he called his wife and said, 'Remember how I told you about falling in the water?' "

Harris had sent him a copy of my article. She found him very pleasant to talk to, and they promised to keep in touch because of the Bower connection. It turns out that Harris had known Bower for years. When Bower was working in the Fincastle post office after retirement from the police force, they used to chat frequently.

She remembers fondly the day he helped an older lady in Fincastle with pipes that kept freezing. Bower got Harris to help him, and they worked one whole day wrapping pipes.

Today, Bower's wife is very ill and he acts as her caretaker, with only a break for a few hours a week when a helper comes in to relieve him. In Harris' opinion, "not a whole lot of people would do what he does." So she was delighted to learn that the boy Bower rescued is also a family man, like Bower, and married for 40 years to the same lady.

When I talked to Palmiter, I, too, found him pleasant to talk with. He was pleased that both he and Bower "had been touched by the Lord to find a woman who'd put up with us. By the grace of God and the angel I married, there were many times when she could have thrown me out of the third-story window and God would have said to me, 'You had it coming.' " Palmiter, having sold his business and become a Methodist lay preacher, and his wife, Linda, were in the process of moving from Maryland to South Carolina when we spoke.

But what about Bower? When I called him with the news, about all he could say was a repeated "Well, I'll be dogged. I can't get over that." He and his family had searched death records for Virginia and for war dead, but of course had not found Palmiter. It turns out that as a young man, Palmiter was rated 1Y for the military because of a bad eye. "Not 4F," Palmiter said. With a 4F category he would have been totally exempt, but those rated 1Y could have been called up in case of severe national emergency.

It also turns out that Palmiter's wife's family are Sturgills, so they both want to come here to visit Bower and her relatives. Bower's reply? "I wish they would; it would tickle me to death. I'll get in touch with him."

Harris had the last word in this happy story. She heard that Palmiter was moving to a community centered around a lake. So she quipped, "He'd better not fall into that pond. Bower won't be anywhere near to rescue him again."

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