Joyce Bawden

Joyce Edith Garber was born in her family’s home in 1935, during the deepest stretch of the Great Depression, in a southwest Iowa town so small it would eventually fall off the state map as a town. Anderson survives today only as a census designation with fewer than forty people, a name on a county plat and not much else. The family later moved a few miles northeast to Randolph, a farming community set between Tabor and Shenandoah.

Joyce was the younger of two daughters in a household of seven, consisting of five children and two parents. Her parents, Chester Christopher Garber, known to everyone as Chet, and Ione Garber, met on the Wyoming frontier, where she was teaching in a one-room schoolhouse and he was working as a cowboy.

This was just the first of many stories.

To this day, the extended Chambers-Garber family is a happy clan of storytellers and musicians, dedicated to public service, the arts, education, and faith. Joyce was very much a part of that tradition. She graduated from Randolph High School in 1953 with nine classmates and then, following her mother’s example, made the bold decision to continue her education at a university and enrolled at Iowa State to study architecture.

That path lasted a year. She changed both her major and her school, moving to Iowa City to pursue a degree in music education at the University of Iowa. It was a more honest calling. Joyce was eternally curious, always wanting to know how things worked and why they worked that way. That curiosity drove her and her outlook on the world the rest of her life.

It was her time in Iowa City, and her experience as a sister in the Alpha Delta Pi sorority, that made her a lifelong Hawkeye and an enthusiastic fan of all college sports (and especially football). After graduation, she returned to southwest Iowa to teach for a while, then moved on to Roswell, New Mexico, and finally landed a job on Iowa’s “east coast,” in a city called Davenport.

Joyce took the music position at J.B. Young Junior High School, located in the center of Davenport, teaching a student body drawn from every income level and social class in the city. She made friends there who would stand with her for the rest of her life. But it was a double date in 1960 that changed everything.

She was living in a house on Forrest Road, kitty-corner from the home of Ray and Viola Bawden. Ray had died in 1954, and the couple’s younger son, John “Tim” Bawden, had left his military service early to come home, live with his newly widowed mother, and go to work in the family business. Bawden Bros., Inc. was a small commercial printing house on East Third Street that also offered photography, engraving, and advertising services. Outside of work, Tim kept busy with community service and scouting, serving as Scoutmaster of Troop 4, sponsored by McKinley Elementary School just down the road.

Joyce and Tim were paired with other people that night. By the end of the evening, the couple found each other, and romance soon followed. By August of 1961, they were back in tiny little Randolph exchanging vows, starting a lifelong partnership that would last just over three decades.

During those thirty-plus years, Joyce and Tim had three children: Mike, born in 1962; Peter, in 1964; and Cynthia, in 1967. In 1964, the Bawdens moved from an apartment into a new home Joyce had helped design. That house, then located in what was considered “rural Bettendorf”, was located just seven-tenths of a mile south of the intersection of Middle Road and a two-lane strip of cinder and stone called Devils Glen Road.

The house was nestled into a heavily wooded ravine and surrounded by another eighty acres of pasture. The boundary of the property formed the southwestern edge of the newly consolidated Pleasant Valley Community School District — a fortuitous bit of geography that would shape the life of the family for two generations.

It was an unusually equal partnership as husband and wife. Joyce had an optimism that matched Tim’s outlook perfectly – and she had her own opinions, which she was never shy about holding. Tim was proud of her for it, and she was every bit as proud of him. In more than thirty years of marriage, their children cannot recall the two of them fighting or even arguing.

Joyce left teaching shortly after getting married, but she never left education. She became active in the PTA at her children’s schools, and by the mid-1970s she had been elected to the Pleasant Valley Community School District Board. She was a passionate advocate for public education, eventually serving at the state level through the Iowa Association of School Boards and representing Iowa and the district at national conferences.

Together with Tim and other leaders in the community, she helped found the Pleasant Valley Educational Foundation. An organization dedicated to helping students continue their education after high school by providing scholarships. Since 1990, the foundation has awarded more than a million dollars to graduating Pleasant Valley seniors, and it now funds more than 135 scholarships a year.

That same conviction, that learning shouldn’t stop at graduation, drew her into a range of charities, nonprofits, and civic organizations built around the same idea. She was a member of her P.E.O. chapter for more than sixty years and served on the boards of the Putnam Museum, United Way, Quad City Bank, and the Community Foundation of the Great River Bend, along with clubs that encouraged lifelong learning, among them the Tuesday Club.

Joyce’s passion for music and the arts continued throughout her life as well.

She found one musical family at First Presbyterian Church of Davenport, singing in the Sanctuary Choir for decades, taking part in a variety of educational and faith-led efforts, and serving on Session as an Elder. First Presbyterian is the oldest Protestant congregation in Davenport, and Joyce’s husband’s people were there at the start. The Bawdens are recognized as one of the few founding families still with the church, and Joyce continued that legacy by gladly accepting the responsibility of chairing the institution’s sesquicentennial celebration, an effort that spanned 1988 and 1989, marking both the congregation’s first service and its formal organization a year later.

Her other musical family could be found in the concert halls and rehearsal spaces of the Quad City Symphony Orchestra. She began volunteering for the old “Tri-City Symphony” not long after arriving in Davenport, and she rose through it to serve as president of the board of directors from 1991 to 1993. She returned to the board of directors from 1996 to 2002, and was named an Honorary Trustee, a distinction she held for the rest of her life. Until very recently, she attended every performance of the season, summer pops included.

Joyce’s passion for music and the arts carried on through her children and grandchildren, continuing the Chambers-Garber tradition of singing songs and telling stories.

That tradition has a particular shape to it. The Chambers-Garber clan produces teachers the way other families produce farmers or lawyers. Ione earned her degree from Iowa State Teachers College — now the University of Northern Iowa — at a time when very few women in southwest Iowa went to college at all. Joyce’s sister Joan, known to the family as Shirley, taught music in Boston. Joyce taught music in Davenport. In the generations that followed: her grandson Tim, teaches science to elementary and junior high students abroad; Chris and Andy, both science teachers; Julia, who taught acting at a dramatic arts conservatory in St. Louis; and Jay, until recently a professor of music composition at Bard College. Nearly every one of them landed in music or in science. Seen against that backdrop, Joyce’s own path from architecture to music education looks less like a change of heart than like a family trait expressing itself.

In 1992, tragedy struck when Tim died suddenly. For the next thirty-four years, Joyce stayed actively involved in the things she loved and kept faith with the interests she and Tim had shared. Key among them for the first five or six years was the family business, and the strong personal relationship she developed with Tim’s nephew, Mark Bawden, who had taken over as President of Bawden Printing and was providing active leadership across the family’s various enterprises. Mark had worked for and been mentored by Tim for decades, and Joyce found great relief in his willingness to listen to her and weigh her opinions as the business continued to grow and evolve.

In 1996 the printing company was sold, and Joyce’s oldest son, Mike, purchased the family’s advertising agency. Mark and Joyce continued to work together for years afterward managing some real estate holdings, but for the most part Joyce was finally able to “retire” and start enjoying the rewards of a life well spent.

She traveled the world with family and friends, documenting those adventures in photographs and journals. Read them and you can feel that she kept Tim with her, in her heart, for every step. She shared those stories with her kids and eventually with her grandkids, still serving as a teacher and a mentor as they grew and raised families of their own.

Joyce was an extrovert in the truest sense. She drew her energy from other people, and she made sure there were always other people around. She was careful to maintain the friendships she and Tim had made over the years. Her golf buddies and her besties were a constant source of delight. And mornings weren’t complete without coffee and cinnamon rolls after a water aerobics workout with “The Wet Babes” (a self-named gang of middle-aged and senior women, most of them widows), who had moments when they seemed considerably more devoted to the social engagement than to the exercise, which, let’s be honest, wasn’t much of a workout anyway (too much laughter and joy).

There were also weddings to attend and birthday parties to throw, graduations and recitals and more.

Joyce was also a fine cook who insisted, for reasons no one ever fully established, that she wasn’t. The family kidded her that the most-used appliance in her kitchen was the speed dial on her telephone, the one that reached the take-out places. She never bothered to argue the point.

And from the mid-90s onward, Joyce enjoyed all of it.

During the last few years of her life, Joyce and her children worked to “downsize” and put life on a scale that was more manageable. Health issues became more acute, and in 2024 she moved into assisted living — a place where she could ask for help and actually receive it.

She traveled less. A holiday trip to Palm Springs in 2023 turned out to be her last great adventure. But by that point, the kids and grandkids (and eventually great-grandkids) could come to her. And they did.

Joyce enjoyed a steady stream of visitors, family and friends alike, reaping the rewards of decades of love, kindness, and compassion in a way that was both deserved and gracious.

Those last months paid one more remarkable dividend, one that delighted everyone who had the pleasure of seeing her regularly. Without the benefit of speech, and with very limited physical ability, she managed to so thoroughly warm the hearts of the people caring for her that they told us they started their days by stopping into her room for a hug and a smile.

Ever gracious. Ever thankful. Ever loving.

It’s a great song worth singing and a story worth telling.

And it’s her story.

Family

Joyce was the last of her generation in the C.C. and Ione Garber household. Her parents have passed, as have all four of her siblings — her sister Joan, known as Shirley, and her brothers Bill, Keith, and Dick. Her husband, Tim, has passed. But the Bawden family remains: sons Mike (wife Caroline) of Riverdale, IA, and Peter (wife Karen) of Studio City, CA, and daughter Cynthia Bawden (husband Steve Cornwell) of Naples, FL; grandchildren Christian, Tim (wife Sarah), Molly Delashmutt, Madeline, Axel Delashmutt, Gray (wife Jade), Kaylee Cornwell (step-daughter of Cindy); and great-grandchildren Oliver and Elliot, sons of Tim and Sarah Bawden, and Ezekiel Hernandez, son of Molly Delashmutt.

Joyce also left behind some very special friends who stood with the family these past few years — helping her get the day started, working out the daily crossword, gossiping about the other girls at the hair salon, or eating a donut hole (or two). Special thanks to Nan, of Good Samaritan Services @ Home, and to Char Keppy, for their love and kindness and for serving as de facto members of our extended family.

The family also extends special thanks to the staffs of StoryPoint Assisted Living and Heartland Hospice for their care and kindness.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests memorial donations in Joyce’s honor be directed to the Pleasant Valley Educational Foundation (re: Joyce & Tim Bawden Memorial Scholarship).