James Ronney Lowe, RPLS No. 4751, (ret) passed away October 20, 2015.
One of my mentors, I met Ronney when starting out as a green office hand around 1991. Ronney soon became an invaluable source of information and was willing to spend time teaching me whenever a question I had about surveying arose. He was a very unselfish person with his time towards me, especially since I was working for my dad at another surveying company altogether. I came to realize that surveyors, at least in our county, weren't really competitors, in a business sense. They all seemed to be interested in the same goal; consistency in retracements of boundaries. The sharing of information seemed to be the rule, not an exception, and Ronney was chief among the surveyors here to practice that.
Fate took a turn for the worse when, in December, 2003, Ronney and his son, Jason, returning from a trip they had taken in their small airplane on a particularly blustery winter night, experienced problems landing and crashed well short of the runway. Jason was killed in the crash and Ronney suffered horribly debilitating brain injuries as a result. Ronney suffered through many months of rehabilitation, and although he regained his physical abilities to function, he never regained what we as a community hoped would be the mental prowess he once possessed. I had lost one of my mentors.
Twelve years have passed since that crash, and not very many days have gone by that I didn't think about, talk about, or just plain miss Ronney. Life has a way of leaving holes in our hearts, but if we're patient, life pays us back by filling them again. Life has a tall order to fill if it intends to replace Ronney, at least for me.
RIP, James Ronney Lowe, until we meet again.