Sixty-five years after she saved his life, here’s what Ken Bowen has to say to Tasma Hinch: “Thank you.”
Not that he knew her name until now. In fact, he’s pretty fuzzy on the story of how she came to pull him from the Campbell River in 1949. He was just two years old at the time.
Tasma — Tammy to her friends growing up in Victoria — is uncertain of the details herself. She was just seven.
This long-ago tale would have been forgotten altogether were it not for Peter German, a retired Mountie from the Lower Mainland who stumbled across it in an old copy of The Shoulder Strap, the journal of the B.C. Provincial Police, an organization that itself faded from history in 1950.
Hinch’s picture was on the magazine cover. Inside was an account of a Doncaster Heights School assembly at which she was pulled out of the crowd and given a bravery award for rescuing Bowen.
Curious, German did a bit of Googling, found a reference to Hinch at an Oak Bay High reunion a few years back. In Victoria this fall, he dropped the magazine at the Times Colonist in case anyone was interested.
Hinch wasn’t hard to find. Life, including a nursing career, a long stint in the military reserves and marriage to an air force general, had taken her away from Victoria, but then brought her back.
She doesn’t recall a lot about the rescue other than it happened when her family lived in Campbell River. A group of kids were playing outdoors one May day when wee Kenny ended up in the chuck. Tammy plunged in after him.
“It was a bit of luck and circumstance, I suppose,” she says. “I had learned to swim the summer before.”
The Hinches moved to Victoria soon after the rescue, and she never saw Bowen again.
More vivid is the memory of being pulled on stage for that award in her Brownie uniform, which felt a bit short. “It was scary to have your knees exposed in those days.”
The rescue was a bit of a cause célèbre, the story going across Canada. “Seven-year-old Tasma Lee (Tammy) Hinch, of Victoria, B.C., learned to swim last year, so two-year-old Kenny Bowen is alive today,” reported the Winnipeg Tribune.
There was talk of Hinch going to Toronto to present flowers at a royal visit, and someone wanted her to model dresses, but young Tasma’s mother didn’t think it was in the best interests of her young daughter to be fawned over in that way, so that was that.
Tasma grew up and largely forgot about the incident, though she did keep swimming, teaching youngsters at Elk Lake and being on the renowned Flying Y team coached by Archie McKinnon and Jack Todd.
In fact, she still swims Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Every Aug. 1 she joins a cottage neighbour in swimming across Shawnigan Lake and back.
As for Bowen, he went on to a career in the Forests Ministry, and gained note as a nature and wildlife photographer, too. He’s retired now, lives in Honeymoon Bay on Cowichan Lake.
He wasn’t hard to track down, either. There was even an online account of life in 1950s Zeballos where, while hospitalized with a broken leg, the young Bowen took the BB gun he got for Christmas and shot out several ornaments on the hospital Christmas tree.
Yes, Bowen now admits, that was he. “One little hospital shooting and it follows you for life.”
As for being rescued as a two-year-old, he heard about it as part of family lore, though without a lot of detail. “I definitely was in danger of drowning in the river.”
Now that he knows Hinch’s name, he wants to make contact to pass on his gratitude. It’s never too late to say thank you, whether for a Christmas present or the gift of life.
