Richard Coke Lower

Richard Coke Lower
November 6, 1935 - January 18, 2022
Sacramento, California - Richard C. Lower
Richard Coke Lower, born 11-6-1935 in Oakland, California, died January 18, 2022 in Sacramento, California of a cluster of pre-existing medical maladies exacerbated by the Covid-19 virus.
Richard was most fortunate in having been born to two loving, non-controlling, indulgent parents: George Turner Lower and Mary Molleston Lower who were born and raised respectively in Oklahoma and Iowa. They encouraged Richard and his brother Stephen in their boyhood enthusiasms. George helped Stephen build a chemistry lab and Richard an aviary for his love birds in the back yard. While Dick did not become a naturalist, Steven did become a Chemistry Professor. The family lived in various California locales as George pursued his career as a printer and ultimately editor for a number of newspapers including the California Rural Press, the California Farmer, finally retiring as editor of the Hayward Daily Review. Richard (Dick) graduated from San Lorenzo High School where he had won honors in foreign language and entered the University of California, Berkeley with the intent of specializing in the study of Asian Languages. He recalled switching his major to American History when he found the native speaker competition in a Haiku class too daunting.
He loved history, the academic life, and Berkeley, and having no interest in leaving— completed his bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees there. He was lucky to have lived in an era of significant expansion of higher education opportunities in California and was hired to teach American history at Sacramento State College in 1966, where he remained until his retirement in 1997. At Sacramento State, he served the History Department as coordinator of the American Section and also as Faculty Advisor of Graduate Students, His area of specialization was the so-called Progressive Era. He was a respected colleague and teacher who never slacked in his attention to students at whatever level. He gave full attention to the essays assigned to seminar and advanced students, covering their papers with commentary and critique in red ink. Students from one seminar gifted him at semester's end with a plaque showing an A——— indicating how hard it was to earn Professor Lower's full A. While teaching full schedules, Richard also managed to author the definitive biography : A Bloc of One. The Political Career of Hiram W. Johnson published by Stanford University Press in 1993. He also studied archival techniques at the National Archives during one Semester Break to equip him to undertake the initial processing of the Political Papers of Congressman John Moss in the Sacramento State Library Archives.
Aside from his academic and professional career, Dick was an excellent friend and a man for all seasons—a punster with a ready and wry sense of humor . He was always up for a challenge to learn a new skill—believing that one could do almost anything if he or she sought knowledge from a book or expert. Richard was as accomplished a householder as he was a scholar. He was a gardener whose garden won the accolade from a friend of, "Little Kew". He installed temperature controlled sprinkling systems, built arbors, green houses, installed a sump pump, dishwashers, dark rooms, and chronicled his and close friends' lives and his own travels with his wonderful professional grade photography.
Dick met his wife, Louellyn Cohan in 1969 at a colleague's Norwegian Independence Day party in Davis, California where he was living. They married two years later in Dick's backyard. Louellyn was also a new faculty member at Sacramento State College in the Government Department. They shared the next 50 years of marriage in an almost unbroken pattern of affection, mutual respect, collaboration and fun.
Moving to Sacramento in 1977 with many boxes of books and four cats to a house built in 1912, Dick took up painting, wallpapering, floor sanding and refinishing, bookshelf building, and antique scouting until the house was just right for them both.
Dick and Louellyn appreciated, were grateful for the special gifts and rhythms of their chosen academic life—-the course preparation, the trips to the Berkeley bookstores to check out the newest offerings, along with visits to to favored school days eateries or epicurean newcomers. But mostly they appreciated the availability of interesting and interested colleagues and students and the time to read and continue to learn.
But above all, Richard and Louellyn were grateful for the surrogate families they belonged to — made of a part of that unusual cohort of faculty that appeared at Sacramento State in the late 1960's, early 70's . Grateful for the years of holiday dinners, ritual birthdays, predictable and supportive friends through thick and thin. Without those close and continuing relationships — the good life they enjoyed would have been much less full and less good. Richard contributed a great deal to the surrogate family gatherings because he was an excellent baker and cook. He kept the household perpetually supplied with his mother's recipe of the best chocolate chip cookies ever. He also made the best rhubarb pie ever, and the best apple pie ever. And certainly the best pie crust ever. And definitely the best New Years Eve Cioppino ever.
In retirement and before, the Lowers travelled to Europe and across the United States and Canada graduating from sleeping bag and tent camping to tent trailer camping, to small r.v. camping to custom made Sportsmobile camping to Alaska and Nova Scotia, with all amenities and luxuries including their Corgi - Sam.
Unfortunately, Richard's multi-gifted life was side-tracked in 2004 by a series of small strokes and a diagnosis of "pure alexia" —an affliction affecting reading which was followed by a slow but inexorable decline in his abilities —leading to further diagnoses of Alzheimers and dementia. In spite of all that, Richard never lost his ability to pun, to be gracious and well-mannered and to detect expressions of idiocy or illogic when they were expressed in or on the media. He is survived by his wife Louellyn, his brother Stephen Lower, his sister-in-law Marlene Lower, and nephew Joel Lower and many good friends and colleagues.