BIOGRAPHY: ED LOWE (Amended for 2009)

Once, and proudly, a Lindenhurst, N.Y., Junior High school English teacher, Long Island’s raconteur/columnist Ed Lowe joined The Suffolk Sun as a daily newspaper reporter in August of 1969.

Two and a half months later, the Sun set.

Newsday, the reigning Long Island daily newspaper, hired Ed Lowe as a reporter.
By 1973 he had lived, somewhat unsuccessfully, as a rich bon vivant at the once-posh Irving Hotel in Southampton; grown a (unsuccessful) victory garden in his back yard, for the sake of 24 (very successful) weekly humor columns; been roughed up on the way to Romania by Czechoslovakian soldiers; lived with all kinds of, “Bayfolk,” for a prize-winning section about Great South Bay; and covered the Town of Babylon, the Suffolk Court System, the Court Martial of Jon Sweeney, and investigated plans to create a gas and oil distribution monopoly in Suffolk and Nassau Counties by the long-gone Northville Industries Company.

He also bought an old wooden boat, an old wooden house, and took lessons in sailing and Lamaze childbirth, all in the pages of Newsday.

He became a featured Newsday columnist in 1976, writing stories and essays three times a week, which won some prizes. In December of 2004, he accepted two offers, one for an early retirement incentive from Newsday, and the other to write once a week for the weekly Long Island Press, as well as The Neighbor Newspapers.

Meantime, Ed Lowe appeared for 14 seasons as a regular panelist on, “Father Tom and Friends,” a weekly cablevision show produced by Msgr. Tom Hartman, former director of Telecare, and, more notably, of , “God Squad,” fame; and from 1999 to 2002, Ed also hosted a daily radio talk show, “Lowecally Speaking with Ed Lowe,” on what then was WLUX 540AM.

In each of its three years on the air, Ed’s program won a FOLIO award from the Long Island Coalition for Fair Broadcasting, now the Fair Media Council.

A humorist-raconteur after the fashion of Mark Twain and Bill Cosby, Ed has performed at Long Island comedy clubs and has served as a Master of Ceremonies or delivered the keynote address for hundreds of charity gatherings and galas, National Honor Society inductions, high school and college commencements and conventions of professional societies, industrial associations and trade and union organizations.

He has keynoted superintendent staff conference days for 73 school districts, three BOCES supervisory districts, six statewide conventions of educators and education administrators and several national conventions of business and trade organizations.

Co-author with New York psychotherapist Stanley Siegel of, “The Patient Who Cured His Therapist,” and, “Uncharted Lives,” both published by Dutton/Plume, Ed Lowe has edited two published collections of his own work: “Ed Lowe’s Long Island,” and “Not As I Do -- A Father’s Report.”
A Marist College alumnus, father of four and grandfather of four, Ed Lowe used to live with his property taxes in Amityville, N.Y., on the South Shore of his beloved Long Island.

However—and, if you think this is long, imagine Ed Lowe’s surprise—on Jan. 5, 2008, in Vermont, while waiting for his second daughter, Colleen, then 39, to read from her work at a triumphant close of a grueling course in Creative Writing, Ed Lowe said, “I think I am having a stroke.”
He was right.

He slept for three months, in Vermont, which he has no memory of; he relaxed, after a fashion, for, well, more—in one of the many ironies of this life of irony, he cannot really be trusted for narrative accuracy regarding details of his brains having fallen out—and emerged, so far, ready to start again. He resumes writing for The Neighbor Newspapers September 09. 2009.