‘Tiny’ Sowell’s niece buried near war vet
Soldier’s remains were returned 73 years after death.
WEST PALM BEACH — Mary Sowell Baldwin was just 5 when her uncle, Richard “Tiny” Sowell, was killed. She lived to see his remains returned 73 years later to West Palm Beach in November. Tiny was buried with full military honors the day before Veterans Day.
Services were held Saturday for Baldwin, who died Aug. 10 at 78 at her Palm Beach Gardens home. She was buried at the family plot in West Palm Beach’s Woodlawn Cemetery, alongside her parents and at the same place where Tiny came home.
“She told me that he taught her how to drive when she was 4,” Baldwin’s cousin and Tiny’s nephew, Lewis Sowell Jr., said Monday from Savannah, Georgia.
“She’s the only one that’s left from when he went to war. She was the only one that knew him.”
Born at Good Samaritan Hospital in West Palm Beach, Mary Sowell attended Stephens College in Missouri and graduated from the University of Florida. She was a homemaker and was active in the Palm Beach Junior League.
“They called her Mary Lindsey because her mother was Mary and her dad was Lindsey. She always thought that was corny, but that’s what most people called her,” Lewis Sowell said Monday.
“She was very active in her community,” he said. “She was real athletic. Everybody liked her.”
In November, frail and using a wheelchair, she was the senior representative of the Sowells at Tiny’s military funeral at Woodlawn.
Sgt. Richard Gordon Sowell, Palm Beach High Class of 1941, had been kidded about his height but was a popular leader at the school. He was a freshman at the University of Florida when he dropped out and joined the Army.
On July 7, 1944, he was killed by a shell in a foxhole on the Japanese island of Saipan. He was 21.
At the time, authorities were unable to claim his body. It would be years later before they could do so. By then, they could not positively identify him, so he lay in a numbered grave in Hawaii until 2015, when the military took a DNA swab from Lewis Sowell Jr. and made a match.
In November, Tiny’s remains were flown with full military honors to Palm Beach International Airport, and went by motorcade to Northwood Funeral home. Two days later, he was buried at Woodlawn.
“He was wonderful. He was loved,” Baldwin said from her wheelchair. “He’d be so pleased.”
Baldwin is survived by her husband, George, a son, Wally, a daughter, Amy Osteen, and two grandchildren. The family asked that donations be made to Trustbridge Hospice of Palm Beach County, or the Center for Great Apes in Wauchula.
‘She told me that he (Richard ‘Tiny’ Sowell) taught her how to drive when she was 4. She’s the only one that’s left from when he went to war.’ Lewis Sowell Jr.
On Mary Sowell Baldwin, who was Tiny’s niece