Tom Dowling

1935 - 2021

Tom Dowling, writer and journalist, died on May 13th at his home in Washington, D.C. Dowling was known to Bay Area readers of the San Francisco Examiner as the book editor and features writer from 1985 to 1993. He was more broadly known for his widely regarded book “Coach: A Season with Lombardi” (Norton 1970) which documented Vince Lombardi’s 1969 season coaching the Washington Redskins football team.

Thomas Irving Dowling Jr. was born in 1935 in Cleveland, Ohio, the only child of Alice Dowling and Tom Dowling Sr. He grew up in West Lafayette, Indiana and graduated from Harvard College in 1958 as an English major and participant in the ROTC.

After graduating he completed his 6 months of military service in the Marine Corps, and then traveled to Europe. En route, on the Holland-American Liner, the Maasdam, he met his future wife, Janet E. Sideman, a New Yorker who was living in Edinburgh, Scotland and running a coffee house called Studio 3. After marrying in Edinburgh, they hitch-hiked across Europe, and into Greece and Turkey on their honeymoon before embarking for Berkeley, California, where he enrolled in a graduate program in English.

In 1961, the couple moved to Washington, D.C. where their son Patrick was born as Dowling began his training as a public information officer with U.S. Information Agency. He was first posted in Karachi, Pakistan for a year, before moving to Tabriz, Iran for two more years. The family returned to Washington where their daughter Rebecca was born in 1967, and where Dowling headed the Pakistani service for the U.S.I.A.’s Voice of America.

In the mid-1960s Dowling elected to pursue his dream as a writer, initially following newly hired Redskin coach Vince Lombardi for the Washingtonian Magazine. Shortly after, he was commissioned by W.W. Norton to write about Lombardi in what became “Coach: A Season with Lombardi” published in 1970 and reviewed as a significant advance in sport’s literature. In “Coach,” Dowling delved into Lombardi’s handling of political division, racial integration and his progressive handling of the rights of black and gay players.

Based on the popularity of “Coach”, Dowling embarked on a ten-year career at the Washington Star in 1971 as a sports writer and later a movie critic. Additionally, he wrote a column about the foibles of the federal bureaucracy, called Federal Cases, before the paper folded in August 1981.

In 1985, Dowling became book editor at the San Francisco Examiner. Readers during his several years at that post will remember many of the memorable interviews that he conducted with prominent writers as they came through town promoting their latest works, including Arthur Miller, Tim O’Brien, Tobias Wolff and John Keegan. During his last years at the Examiner, until he retired in 1993, Dowling also covered local news, including the devastating Oakland Hill’s Fire in 1991.

Upon his retirement, he returned to Washington DC, where for a quarter century he turned his longtime passion for literature into a fulltime business selling used and rare books, starting with Ocean View Books in his barn at his family’s week-end house and later in his on-line book business. Dowling is remembered by his family and friends as “larger than life,” an avid reader and a prolific and humorous story-teller. He and his wife enjoyed many years of international and domestic travel. Until the end, he pursued his passion for writing, and has written a number of unpublished novels, children’s books, TV pilots and plays.

He died peacefully in the company of his family at home in northwest Washington from cancer on May 13. He was 85. Dowling is survived by his wife of 62 years, Janet, his two children, Patrick and Rebecca and three grandchildren, Gabriela, Elena, and Ezra. A memorial service is planned for the summer.