By Kathy Chaffin
kchaffin@salisburypost.com
Daniel R. McDowell discovered the joy of writing later in life.
Growing up, he had difficulty with English classes and graduated high school with a low grade-point average. After serving three years in the Navy, he made his living as a welder and fitter for various companies, the last, Fuchs Systems in Salisbury.
When his career was cut short by a heart attack and subsequent bypass surgery, McDowell’s friends encouraged him to get a hobby. “So I went to school trying to get into computers,” he says.
But it wasn’t the computer classes that captured his interest. It was the English class he enjoyed the most.
“When I took the first portion of the class,” he says, “I told myself, ‘I’m not going to let anything bother me or intimidate me. I’m going to do it.’
“I did exactly what the instructor said, and I made an A in the course.”
The next semester, he took a college-level English class and made an A on his first two papers. It was after an instructor at Rowan-Cabarrus Community College told him his writing was higher than college level that McDowell started taking it seriously.
At 60, what he found was that when he wrote, the words flowed through him.
When he was upset about a situation involving greed and envy, McDowell poured his feelings into a poem he titled, “The Rider of the Green Horse.”
“I had always heard the saying, ‘You’re green with envy,’ ” he says. “That had stuck in my head, and the other part was ‘that old monster greed is going to get you.’
“So I combined those two as characters, and the rest of it just more or less came out of me like somebody, sort of like God, was telling me what to say.”
His wife, Alfaretta, saw an article about the annual National Creative Arts Festival competition sponsored by the Department of Veterans Affairs and told him about it. She had read his poem and encouraged him to enter it.
McDowell reluctantly agreed, thinking it didn’t have a chance of winning. He ended up claiming first place in the poetry-inspirational category at the local and regional levels, then went on to claim first place in the nation.
When he found out the judges were professionals ó one teaches creative writing in college ó the award meant even more. “I was just in a state of shock over the whole thing,” he says.
Last month, Shelia Womack, interim associate director at the Hefner VA Medical Center, presented McDowell with a gold medal and certificate of recognition signed by Dr. Michael J. Kussman, the VA undersecretary for health.
McDowell has continued writing poems. He also expanded “The Rider of the Green Horse” into a 76-page book for children.
Ideas come to him in different ways.
When one of his English instructors at Rowan-Cabarrus assigned the class to write a poem based on an actual experience, McDowell listened amusedly as his fellow ó and much younger ó students complained they hadn’t lived through enough to complete the assignment.
“I didn’t say anything,” he recalls, “and then that Saturday, a bird flew in the garage and couldn’t get back outside.”
McDowell, who lives in Spencer, says the frightened bird was flying around frantically, hitting the rafters of the garage. When it finally settled onto a windowsill, he says he crept over quietly and cracked the window enough for it to get out.
“That window was fully open,” he says. “I could feel the breeze, but the bird was frozen in fear.”
When he stepped away, McDowell says the bird finally realized the opportunity for escape and flew away. Afterward, he thought about how his fellow students were like that bird and wrote a poem about the importance of overcoming fear in life.
“It’s called ‘A Sparrow in My Class,’ ” he says.
McDowell wrote another poem comparing life to a basic training course, after which the character’s father in heaven congratulates him on a job well done.
“I’m constantly working on them,” he says.
A native of Connellsville, Pa., McDowell worked in his home state for several years before relocating to South Carolina. It was there that he saw an ad for a job at Fuchs and moved to Rowan County.The company has since shut down its Salisbury operations.
McDowell enjoys railroad models and is active in the Harold B. Jarrett American Legion Post.
His wife works at the Piedmont Correctional Institute. They attend Spencer Presbyterian Church.