Generosity on Wheels

Concordia donor Jim Rowe, who is 97 years old, spent 42 years in the aeronautical industry helping to engineer rockets and then served as a vice president for a major defense industry supplier. He still golfs weekly and delivers meals to the homebound in his community near Sacramento — and for more than 20 years he has generously supported Concordia University Irvine with contributions to student scholarships and capital building projects, and an estate plan which will bless the University well into the future.

“God has done everything for me,” says Rowe. “Every time I turned around and it looked like dire clouds, He made them into sunshine. That is my life.”

At nearly a century in age, Rowe clearly remembers his childhood in the 1930s. He recalls his grandfather having “a great big picture of Hoover in his window, and the guy across the street had a great big picture of Roosevelt,” Rowe says. “I think that was the 1932 election.”

The town he was raised in, Oberlin, Ohio, served as a safe haven on the underground railroad during the Civil War, a place where slaves could stay while escaping to Canada from Southern plantations.

“The little house I was raised in had a false basement in which the kids would play like it was our secret hideaway,” Rowe says. “It had been a place for Black people seeking freedom to stay during the day, where nobody would know they were there, and be picked up by wagons at night.”

During the Depression, Rowe used cereal box tops to line the bottoms of his shoes, which were riddled with holes. He liked mathematics and science, and upon graduating high school in 1944, enrolled at an aeronautical school with the ambition of designing airplanes.

“It was something I had been wanting to do all during high school,” he says. “I would draw airplanes during class. On Labor Day weekend there were air races at the Cleveland airport. Our family would go into a farmer’s field, pay to park and sit on the top of the car and have a picnic while the airplanes roared just a few hundred feet above our heads around the pylons. It was just a thrill. It set me to thinking, why don’t I design airplanes?”

He served a year in the U.S. Navy near the end of World War II, then returned to Parks College of Aeronautical Technology in East St. Louis, founded by a famous flier named Oliver Parks, to train aeronautical engineers, mechanics and pilots. After graduating, Rowe discovered the aeronautical industry was glutted with post-war pilots and airplane mechanics, so he taught at Iowa State University in Ames and earned his master’s degree there in theoretical and applied mechanics. He also met Phyllis, his wife of 66 years, and they married in 1950. She was Lutheran, and he became Lutheran, too, for the rest of his life.

Rowe was called back into service with the Navy for two years in 1951 while Phyllis was pregnant with the first of their two children, both daughters. After serving as the communications officer on the USS Coral Sea in the Mediterranean Sea and at NATO in Naples, Italy, Rowe returned to Ohio to work for NACA, the predecessor of NASA. In 1955 saw an ad in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer that would define his career. Aerojet General Corporation, based in Azusa, California, was looking for aeronautical engineers to work in rocketry. Rowe inquired, and in response the company precipitously sent a telegram saying, “We will have a moving van at your house Friday morning.”

“I was so mad because I told them I wasn’t accepting it until we got home from vacation,” he recalls. “We went to bed that night all churned up, and didn’t know what to do with this unexpected event. The next morning we got up and said, ‘Let’s go.’ We sold the house the same week.”

Aerojet had been founded by three scientists at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena who were now making their patented, jet-assisted solid rockets for the Navy. The Rowes drove from Cleveland to Azusa during a two-week heat spell that pushed temperatures over 110 degrees every day. They doubted they had made the right decision until Rowe went into work and received “the most fabulous reception you could imagine. The Lord had sent me there, and I was with the company for 40 years.”

Business was brisk, and the company grew to tens of thousands of workers, both in Southern California and in Sacramento. He wrote proposals touting the benefits of the company’s rockets. Rowe was promoted steadily and became the company’s liaison to the U.S. Congress and Pentagon in Washington, D.C., in 1961. After 13 years, he moved to Sacramento to become Aerojet’s vice president of marketing.

“It was the best place to work that could ever be,” he says.

Upon retiring in 1995, Rowe put his energy into three things: helping elderly people file federal and state income taxes through a program with the IRS; teaching a course in safe driving for older drivers; and delivering meals, a task he has done for 21 years and counting. Rowe’s route near his El Dorado Hills home is 35 miles long and takes a couple of hours to complete. It’s not just about delivering food but looking after the homebound to see if they are okay, he says.

“I let them know I’m their friend as well as food deliverer,” he says.

There have been times he knocked on the door and found that someone had fallen and could not get up. On the day of his interview with Concordia Magazine, Rowe was picking up someone else’s meal delivery route as well.

He well remembers a dinner held in a Sacramento hotel for present and prospective Concordia donors in 2003.

“Tim Jaeger was there, and we struck it off very well,” says Rowe. “I thought Concordia University Irvine was the most attuned to today of any of the universities I had read about. Concordia was about progress, seeking the people that need us, being there for them.”

The Rowes (Phyllis went to be with the Lord in 2015) decided to distribute some of their wealth to five entities, including Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, Lutheran Hour Ministries, the Salvation Army, and Concordia University Irvine. “All those places give back more than they receive,” says Jim.

Former Concordia vice president Hank Aschbrenner says Jim has supported Concordia in “a major way” for more than 20 years. “Several years ago when he amended his living trust, Jim named Concordia University Irvine as a major beneficiary of his estate when he is called to heaven by our Lord,” says Aschbrenner. “Jim is a shining example of what can be done when generous Christians take the time and effort to remember an institution such as ours with a major estate gift which can live in perpetuity. We couldn’t exist without people like Jim. Estate gifts are extremely important.”

Rowe has generously supported a variety of Concordia projects, including Vision 2025, specifically CU Center renovation, and student scholarships. “Our friendship and respect for each other has grown over these 20-plus years,” says Jaeger, who enjoys talking with Jim on occasion. “We are so blessed by his generous heart toward our students.”

Rowe has one surviving daughter, Valeri, who lives with her husband near Sacramento. Jim continues to play golf weekly at the nearby military golf course.