Thank You, Bob Bowman
by Lynn Behrendt
A town is made up of its buildings and roads, its land, its businesses, but most of all, a town is defined by the people who live there. In a small town like Red Hook, every person can have a real impact on what our town is like and what it will become. Community-mindedness is a popular concept these days, and a good ethic, no doubt. But some people were community-minded before the “Think Global Act Local” mantra started showing up on bumper stickers. Bob Bowman, a lifelong resident of our area who died last spring, was one such person.
Bob grew up on a farm in Milan. He attended elementary school in a one-room schoolhouse in Lafayetteville. Both he and his wife, Alma, graduated from Pine Plains High School. They were childhood sweethearts and had been married just shy of 60 years when Bob passed away. They have two children, two grandchildren, and a great granddaughter. During the course of his life, Bob served as town supervisor, mayor of the village, board member of the Dutchess County Agricultural Society (the Fairgrounds) and Northern Dutchess Hospital, along with a very long list of other local charities. Both his wife and daughter say that Bob was a real “people person.” Others must agree, because Red Hook Rotary voted him citizen of the year in 2008. Perhaps one of Bob Bowman’s greatest legacies was the business he started and ran with his daughter, Patricia—RMB Enterprises, the ice cream shop known to everyone in Red Hook and surrounding towns simply as the Holy Cow.
By the time Holy Cow opened in 1980, Bob had had lots of dairy and ice cream company experience. He had been a general manager at Silverlake Dairy, located for some 40 years just north of the IGA on Route 9, as well as working as the regional manager of the Dairylea Co-Operative and as regional sales manager of HP Hood, Inc. When his daughter Patricia, who’s known as “P. B.,” decided she wanted a change from her job teaching physical education in the Red Hook schools, and a space located next to the bank south of town became available, opening an ice cream shop just seemed like the thing to do.
Holy Cow is a real family business. Not only was Holy Cow started and run by a father-daughter team, but to this day, Bob’s wife goes in to bake the chocolate chip cookies with which the delicious Chipwich is made, and a granddaughter worked there as well, before moving to Florida. Today, P. B. continues to run the shop, with the help of a dedicated bunch of employees. (By the way, if you’re wondering where the name came from, it was an inspiration of P.B., a staunch Yankees fan, in honor of shortstop and sports announcer Phil Rizzuto, who was famous for saying the phrase).
Holy Cow has become an institution of sorts; a gathering place, for friends and family after a Little League game, or when the movie lets out, or when you just want to go somewhere casual and comfortable. On any given summer evening, in fact, even when the line of customers winds out the door and into the parking lot, people don’t hesitate to get in line. It’s never very long a wait, and besides, one is very apt to run into a friend or neighbor while waiting, and have a chance to visit. P. B. says, about the business, “We keep things simple.” In other words, she explained, though you can’t get a birthday cake with a computer-generated sugar transfer photo of Spongebob on top of it, the ice cream is simple, delicious, and remains remarkably reasonably priced.
One of the more interesting and possibly unknown facts about the Holy Cow business is that they don’t do any advertising whatsoever. As P. B. explained to me, the money that normally would be spent on advertising is instead donated to local charities. So Bob Bowman’s generosity and love of his community continues on, it seems, and life in Red Hook is sweeter because of him.
