About the only thing Gary Bowe and Sherri Stuart have in common
is their love for Gilroy.
About the only thing Gary Bowe and Sherri Stuart have in common is their love for Gilroy.
The Chamber of Commerce’s man and woman of the year do not even live in the same town any more, but they both relish the time they have devoted to Gilroy, Bowe as a number-savvy tax bookkeeper with a knack for medical charity and Stuart as a jewel-merchant-turned-grant-writer for Bay Area nonprofits.
Nine years ago Bowe began Project Share Life, a bone-marrow donor project he orchestrated through his involvement with Rotary International. The business club helped Bowe gather volunteers, set up events and register more than 20,000 donors, including outgoing Gilroy Police Department Chief Gregg Giusiana.
It seems almost natural for Bowe to have created such a philanthropic group since the calm number-cruncher used to endanger his own skeleton as an auto racer and motocross enthusiast.
“It was on a dirt track, one level up from destruction derby,” Bowe, 57, said of his “low-budget” racing days throughout the Central Valley in the late 1970s. “That’s when I was young and immortal.”
For Stuart, the notion of mortality struck her one morning nearly 20 years ago when she said she had to step over homeless people in downtown San Francisco to get to her Macy’s office, where she would purchase jewels from across the world for the department store.
“I remember coming into the office one day because a sheik from the Middle East had bought three necklaces for his three wives: one sapphire, one ruby, and one emerald,” Stuart recalled Wednesday morning at St. Joseph’s Family Center on Church Street. “But in order to get into the office that day, I literally had to step over homeless people.”
So began a change in her life’s direction, Stuart said.
She moved to Gilroy just before the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 to work for the nonprofit South County Housing. Now she is St. Joseph’s treasurer and president of the board of directors for Advent Ministries, a charity that helps about 150 neglected children and teens recovering from drug and alcohol addictions.
Her forte is grant writing, and for the past 10 years she has helped raise more than $40 million for up to 20 charities per year, some as far away as Salinas, she said.
Bowe and his wife, Marlene Aza, now live farther away than that, outside of expensive California in Spokane, Wash., where he enjoys semi-retirement, he said.
“We moved up to Washington earlier this month to slow down a bit,” Bowe said. “Gilroy was a wonderful community to raise my kids in and live in for 30 years. I love the volunteer spirit of the community … We definitely miss that and our tremendous network of friends.”
Bowe plans on returning for the Garlic Festival next year, he said, and his 24-year-old daughter, Antoinette Bowe, still lives here and coaches freshman volleyball at Gilroy High School. His 22-year-old son, John Bowe, attends Cal State University at Fullerton and works for a construction company in the Los Angeles area, he said.
When it comes to biological children, though, Stuart, 57, has none: She cares for the forgotten and her 88-year-old mother, Vivian Stuart, an abstract painter who suffers from emphysema.
“I like to think that nonprofits are out there doing God’s work,” said Stuart, adding that St. Joseph’s serves 2,500 people a month, or about 5 percent of Gilroy’s population.
Supporting the arts is another way to help the community, Stuart said. She has helped the Gilroy Arts Alliance on its quest to erect an arts center downtown through the Theater Angels Art League, which she has patronized for the past seven years, she said. Art builds community, Stuart said, and preempts desperation that often rears itself in the preventable form of homelessness.
When she is not volunteering her services to Rebekah’s Children Services, the school district or various churches, Stuart said she sometimes whips up gourmet meals to sell for charities. She apparently cooks a mean filet mignon, but she does not like to brag.
“I’m not used to talking about myself. I’m nervous about my speech in February,” said Stuart, referring to her and Bowe’s big evening Feb. 9, when the two will formally accept their awards at San Juan Oaks Golf Course in Hollister beginning at 5:30 p.m. Afterward, the chamber’s new board of directors will convene, and champagne will flow.
Bowe served on the board from 1988 to 1994, but unlike Stuart, he said he is not nervous about his speech. But his wife is.
“My wife is more nervous than I am,” Bowe said. “She said, ‘I know you’re going to get up there and try to be funny.’ ”
Funny or not, Bowe said he would think about speaking after Stuart to help calm her nerves.
