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Photo Mary Ann Bragg
The Fowler-Bombardier family in Provincetown — (left to right) Tom Bombardier, sons Gerald and Henry and John Fowler. |
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Couple’s giving nature finds new expressions
Bombardier & Fowler’s gifts bolster GLAD, Provincetown library
Mary Ann Bragg
Banner Staff
Two-year-olds ask a lot of questions.
On a recent sunny morning at his house in Provincetown, toddler Gerald Fowler-Bombardier holds a star-shaped toy in front of his face and wants to know, “What’s that?” He carefully places one finger on a tape recorder and asks, “What’s that?”
Brother Henry, also two, stands across the coffee table and raises a slinky toy high in the air and asks, “What’s that?” And later he’ll ask, and ask and ask, for help with his red plastic watch.
Such is the entrance to the Fowler-Bombardier household, where two little boys make their way down a set of stairs by grabbing hold of the nearest finger. Dogs bark in the backyard. Phones ring. Conversation holds forth in the midst of rattlers pushed across the carpet at high speed.
“Knowing what I know now, about how great it is,” says Tom Bombardier of being a father. “If you don’t know that ahead of time, you don’t know how much you’re missing. Seriously, if there were some way of knowing that ahead of time, how great it is, I definitely would have done it even if we hadn’t been partners. Really, it’s a life-changing experience.”
On Aug. 21 the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force will honor Bombardier and his partner John Fowler for their financial contributions to the effort to legalize gay marriage. Since 2002 the couple has given $300,000 to the Task Force and the Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders in Boston. This week the Provincetown Board of Library Trustees announced that the couple has donated $100,000 to the library construction project on Center Street for the new children’s library, in honor of the men’s two adopted sons.
“There’s a long history in the United States, going back to Andrew Carnegie endowing libraries across the country,” Bombardier says. “The public education system and also the public library system are two of the great equalizers in the country. We both thought that this was a good combination of public moneys and private moneys to do this, to build a new library.”
Bombardier, born in Holyoke, is a board-certified ophthalmologist who co-owns Ambulatory Surgical Centers of America (ASCOA), a national group of surgery centers, and develops real estate on Cape Cod and in Palm Springs, Calif. Fowler, who was born in Connecticut, remodels and renovates historic homes and is often the stay-at-home dad.
“The library is an unusual gift,” Bombardier says. “It’s a large gift for us and it’s our first time giving to the library. Generally if you look at our giving to GLAD, I mean it goes back about five years to $1,000 or $2,000.”
Both men describe their upbringings as modest.
Neither has inherited trust funds, although Bombardier says philanthropic giving has been a part of his adult life since medical school. The men created a family charitable trust three years ago, as ASCOA flourished, earmarked for family and adoption issues for gay people, AIDS-related giving and individual cases of financial need. (For instance, they support a person attending medical school and supplemented the income of a family who attended Provincetown’s annual Family Week activities this year.)
“I think we both view [GLAD] as the little engine that could,” Bombardier says. “It does an awful lot. We visited their offices, and their offices look like a college dormitory. I mean, these are not people who are spending a lot of money on themselves. They’re people who are working from morning to night, doing great work with very little. With little organizations it’s really easy to see where your dollars are going. … We have ended up becoming friends with some of the people from GLAD and so we have a good sense of where they’re spending it now, where they need it next year and how much they need.”
The couple’s Task Force donation will be used for voter education in Massachusetts, for those who are undecided on the issue of gay marriage. With the library donation the two men want to jump-start fundraising for that institution and inspire others as well.
“One of the things that we see going on right now that’s really nice is that there are people stepping forward in a major way to support this [town],” Bombardier says, mentioning donors to the Provincetown Theater Foundation and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. “We looked at the library and it seemed like … it’s a major structure in town. Certainly there are people who are working very hard at bringing the project together and they’re scraping to get donations.
We’re actually hoping that other people will beat us in terms of donations to the library, that it will be identified as another worthwhile [place] to donate. And it’s not just people who can write big checks. Lots of other people can write smaller checks that are equally valuable.”
“We look at our wedding,” Bombardier continues, referring to his and Fowler’s marriage two weeks ago in Provincetown. “It was a very, very, very warm environment. It was a very comfortable environment for all sorts of different people. I think that part of that has been [from] consistent giving through the years, of helping people where they need help. And I think it’s kind of a cascade effect. It’s something where, a lot of times, these people do the same thing for other people. And the thing that comes back to the initial person is this warm environment of friends, of very good people.”
The two men, together for eight years, met in Connecticut and moved in 1997 to Provincetown, which they consider their home. In the last five years they have spent winter months in southern California. “We enjoy being there,” Bombardier says. “On the other hand, at least for me, I’m very grateful to Massachusetts right now. Starting with the adoption process, where it’s hard to believe how good the state was about this, even from the point of the court in Barnstable. I mean they were just wonderful. … I realize whenever I look at the pictures with the state seal in the background and the judge next to us and our two little kids, how grateful we were to the state. And then, how much more can you ask than what they’ve just given us by way of the marriage issue. That’s one of the things that’s going to weigh heavily on where we bring up the kids.”
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Wellfleet cops watch with hidden camera
In the News
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Aug 5th, 2004