ALTAMONT — Monday morning, Bette Cowley had a lifetime of treasures spread out on the bed she and her husband had shared for decades. Ed Cowley died on Saturday morning, Oct. 11, 2014. He was 89.

Mrs. Cowley was making a display to memorialize him for their children. The treasures, mute in a dresser drawer, told of a life that was both broad and deeply rooted. He was an artist, a soldier, a teacher, and a family man.

Mrs. Cowley, whose eyesight is failing, knew most of the objects by their feel. A recording of traditional Irish music played as she sorted; she said the music had helped him through his last days.

She created the bedside display, which she understood as symbolic of “togetherness,” with a backdrop of some of her husband’s art. “He knew we were together even when he wasn’t equipped up here,” she said, tapping her head.

There were the stained glass towers he’d made of red, white, and blue after the terrorists felled the Twin Towers in Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001. Mr. Cowley’s strong yet fanciful towers were displayed in the Main Street storefront of his friend, Cindy Pollard. Passers-by in those dark times would gaze at them and feel better about America.

Mrs. Cowley plucked from the drawer a shiny silver badge that she called a newsboy bootblack; it was stamped with the words “Street Trade Permit” and a number. Mr. Cowley, the son of a Buffalo fire captain, had delivered newspapers as a boy. “He made good money,” she said. “He had a long route.”

There was a colorful Boy Scout card, filled in with his name. “Do a good turn daily,” it said — a lesson Mr. Cowley had taken to heart.

An important treasure anchoring one end of the display table is a book that forms a retrospective of Mr. Cowley’s art. Inside the front cover, Mrs. Cowley tucked colorful works of art her husband had drawn in January. “His creative juices never stopped,” she said.

She also displayed a shamrock he made of green glass “symbolic of our years in Ireland,” she said, and a paperweight depicting Cottage City where they had a summer home on Martha’s Vineyard. A horseshoe signified his dedication to the game, and a line of his baseball caps showed his allegiance to everything from Turning Stone, where the couple had fun gambling on set funds, to the 94th Infantry Division, in which he served under General George Patton.

Mrs. Cowley opened a leather case with war medals inside. She knew the Bronze Star by the feel of its five points. She placed it in front of a picture of him as a dashing young man in an Army uniform. She also placed there the Combat of Infantry Badge — a rifle with a wreath.

Mr. Cowley had termed it a “Badge of Courage” and written how General Omar Bradley described an infantryman’s chances of survival: “The rifleman fights without promise of either reward or relief...After weeks or months in the line only a wound can offer him the comfort of safety, shelter, and a bed. Those who are left to fight, fight on, evading death but knowing that with each day of evasion they have exhausted one more chance for survival. Sooner or later, unless victory comes, this chase must end on the litter or in the grave.”

Nearby was a snapshot of a gray-haired Mr. Cowley holding a box of letters he had mailed home to his family in Buffalo during the war.

Next to his Army portrait was a framed photo of the two of them as a young couple. After the war, Mr. Cowley had knocked on the door of a Greenwich Village apartment he had been told by an Army buddy belonged to an artist, Jimmy Andrews, but the apartment had been sublet.

“Eddy knocked at the door of this little apartment and there I was,” said Mrs. Cowley. That was in December 1948.

“We had our first date on New Year’s at the Beaux Arts Ball in the Village,” she recalled.  “We were married three months later.”

One of the reasons the marriage lasted for over 65 years, she said was, “We had fun.”

On that first New Year’s date, the couple had noticed discarded Christmas trees along the sidewalk. “We hadn’t had Christmas together so we brought one of the trees back to my little apartment and propped it up,” Mrs. Cowley said. “We had a party. People kept coming. We dated all night — we had drinks and food — and all the next day until two or three the following night....”

Their parties continued and were famous in and around Altamont. They had a “slab party” when they poured the base for the house they designed and built themselves. “We did it together,” said Mrs. Cowley.

Every room of the house is graced with Mr. Cowley’s art, which is often practical as well as expressive. He built the massive dining room table, for example, of redwood. “We call it our holy table,” said Mrs. Cowley because of the geometric spaces between the boards that make up the tabletop. When catching crumbs got to be too much, they installed a cover on top.

The gardens that form the outdoor artistry were designed by Mrs. Cowley. A good harvest called for a cucumber festival.

And the couple was renowned for their outdoor art parties. “He hung his paintings from trees,” recalled Mrs. Cowley. “We had a bar out there.”

What his daughter Kathleen Cowley remembered best from the parties were the lollipop trees her father painted, complete with real lollipops for the kids.

Through tears, she recalled her father as at once strong and gentle. “I always knew he was a war hero,” she said. “It’s neat to grow up in awe of your father…But he was also a gentle and thoughtful person. He was my most valued counsel. I so admired his wisdom and his balance, his ethics and his advice — his lessons.”

She remembered how he’d bring treats of homemade chocolates from Candy Kraft in Guilderland for his children and “big Valentines for my mother.” His fun-loving side involved taking his kids for adventures — to the Flying Horses Merry-Go-Round, to the Altamont Fair, to Disney World, and to roller coasters anywhere.

He had enjoyed playing horseshoes with his father, she said, and then taught the game to his sons.

“He loved his grandchildren and he adored Finnegan,” Kathleen Cowley said of his great-grandchild, who is now one-and-a-half years old. “He loved all creatures,” she went on. “He was kind and gentle.”

She also said, “My father loved words and playing with words…I don’t know anyone else with a sense of humor like his. He was so clever but never cruel. He didn’t laugh at other people. There’s often an edge to humor, but not his. He loved people and had many, many friends.”

She concluded, “He was a free spirit…He believed in good.”

Soldier and philosopher

Ed Cowley joined the Army when he was 18. He was originally in a program geared to give a college education to the soldiers who qualified and, although he passed all the tests, he and others in the program were pressed into the infantry instead.

All through the war, he wrote letters home to his parents and younger sister, Peggy, addressed to their home on Woodside Drive in Buffalo. After his mother died, his wife found the box of 228 letters carefully catalogued by his mother, who had worked as a stenographer.

“I wrote mostly to let them know I was still alive,” Mr. Cowley said. The letters don’t contain a lot of gory battle details, although Mr. Cowley served in the 94th Infantry Division under Patton in the Battle of the Bulge, the war’s bloodiest with 18,000 Americans killed. His letters did include his artwork.

When he was wounded, he earned the Purple Heart but declined the honor, he said, because he knew it meant a message would be sent home about his injury.

In 1998, Mr. Cowley was one of several old soldiers telling schoolchildren at the Home Front Café in Altamont about war. He took the starch out of heroism and spoke of his wartime work with candor and self-deprecating humor. “We landed after D-Day and fought in four battles in Europe,” he told the children matter-of-factly, pointing to the stars on his uniform.

Perhaps the worst wartime sights Cowley saw were the Nazi death camps, with Jews and Poles, that his company liberated. “We didn’t know anything about it,” he said. “The people in the camps walking around were skeletal. The people inside were dying…You see bad things in war all the time. This was different.”

Mr. Cowley wrote a riveting series of columns for The Enterprise in 2000 about his wartime experiences.

Describing the aftermath of his first battle, Mr. Cowley, who was raised as a Catholic, wrote of a Protestant chaplain who “went from man to man and spoke softly to one and all. A bit later, he motioned us to kneel and have a period of silence. Nearly everyone carried a gun and now they were kneeling by them…It let every man deal with the shock, the sadness, and even the fear without any direction or practiced response. It was, quite simply, the most compelling religious episode I have ever known.”

About two weeks later, a Catholic chaplain scolded the Catholic soldiers for attending a Protestant service. “As the Mass went on,” Mr. Cowley wrote, “I reflected on what that meant. I knew he was right. It was a Protestant service. Then I quietly gave this one soldier’s thanks to God for that Protestant chaplain having been there at the precise moment when all of us needed him.”

Artist and teacher

When he got home from the war, Mr. Cowley painted a watercolor of his Army boots and jacket, and he got on with his life, studying at Albright Art School and Buffalo State College. He then went on to earn a master’s of fine arts degree from Columbia University.

He came to Albany in 1951 as an art teacher in the Milne School of the State University and was named chairman of the university’s art department in 1955. He retired from the University at Albany in 1987, after having guided the art department’s expansion and move to its new campus.

In a retrospective exhibition at the University Art Gallery the year he retired, Director Nancy Liddle wrote, “…It is still mainly in a university setting that an artist of Edward Cowley’s persuasion may enjoy the freedom to develop and expand an aesthetic and social philosophy which speaks to the desirability of a knife’s having a balanced feel as well as cutting edge.”

“There was nobody like Ed,” said Barbara Harris, an Altamont artist and long-time art teacher at Schalmont who studied under Mr. Cowley in the 1970s. “He’s everything you’d want in an art professor.”

He was always accessible to students, she said, and he taught the foundation of art in ways that would last a lifetime. “He did so much good for everybody,” she said. “He built a nice foundation for understanding design and composition.”

Ms. Harris went on, “He was very knowledgeable, very articulate and totally willing to share himself with his students.” What she learned all those years ago on the elements of line, shape, color, form, and texture informed her own teaching of art, Ms. Harris said.

Describing Mr. Cowley’s personality in the classroom, she said, “He didn’t act like a big-shot artist. He had a tremendous sense of humor, and he was kind. He made things fun and light.”

Outside of the classroom, as the department head, he was inspirational, too. “Ed hired the entire faculty,” she said. “He was the only art teacher when the college was smaller. With the move to the big campus, he hired well-established artists…He was very careful to choose different types so students would have a well-rounded education.”

Mr. Cowley also put an emphasis on having the artists teach. “It wasn’t like having TAs,” she said of graduate students who would serve as teaching assistants for undergraduates. “He hired artists to teach you so they gave the best of themselves…It was a very special time.”

She concluded, “Ed did so much good for everybody.”

In 2003, Mr. Cowley wrote a column once a month for The Enterprise, reflecting each month on a painting that was hung in a village venue.

His artwork also hangs in local museums — including the Schenectady Museum, the Smith College Museum of Art, the Berkshire Museum, and the Albany Institute of History & Art.

His home, nestled in the woods on the hillside above Altamont, may be his most stunning gallery.

His studio there is filled with samples from a lifetime of work. Pictures of his wife abound there — one of them is of her as a young woman, looking beautiful in a bathing suit; a red glass heart hangs next to the picture.

The studio is dominated with a glass house — one wall reflects his Irish heritage with bold Celtic symbols; a second wall is vibrant with carnival scenes; and a third wall, filled with all sorts of blooming flowers, he dedicated to his wife. This wall is in subtler hues than the walls on either side. “Mostly, hers whispers,” Mr. Cowley said.

His stained-glass making was serendipitous. He was given a Ford Foundation fellowship to paint and study in Ireland. “You knew the Irish had produced so much literature but not art,” his wife recalled when they talked about his stained glass before a retrospective show at the Albany Center Gallery in 2012. “You wanted to explore that. You found out why. Writers could always have paper, but it requires more in a downtrodden country to have paints.”

Stained glass was developed as an art form, though, because it had a place in the church.

When Mr. Cowley was put off by an overbearing and pompous teacher at the Royal Hibernian Academy, he walked out of the class and, down the road, he came across a stained-glass workshop. The artist in charge there, John Murphy, not only taught him about stained glass but also became a lifelong family friend.

One of Mr. Cowley’s students who is now the curator for the village of Altamont Archives and Museum, Marijo Dougherty, summed up his work this way: “Ed Cowley was an all-American artist, whose work never went out of style because he used his heart as his personal compass,” she stated. “His work has a compositional brilliance, which he used both in his stained-glass creations and in his pastel drawings.

“Utilizing a unique painting style, leaning heavily on his love of architecture and its formal structure, his work has preserved for generations to come, the look and feel of the village of Altamont.”

Mover and shaper

Mr. Cowley was central to shaping Altamont as we know it today and also to the local environmental movement, according to Lou Ismay who was a colleague of his at the University at Albany and also an Altamont neighbor.

Mr. Cowley was a founder of an environmental forum where students from the university and beyond would listen weekly to a series of speakers. “Ed conceived of an entirely different kind of educational program,” said Mr. Ismay. The program ran for a decade, starting in the late 1960s. “Even Erastus Corning would call after a session and ask for clarification,” said Mr. Ismay of Albany’s long-time mayor. He said the mayor was influenced not to allow a factory on the waterfront because it would affect nearby public housing.

“The students had to do something useful in the community,” Ismay said. “The Pine Bush was saved.” Don Rittner, an archaeologist and historian, wrote his first book as a student in that program, Mr. Ismay said, and Lynne Jackson, a guiding light for Save the Pine Bush, was part of it, too.

“Ed affected the lives of many, many people as a result of that program,” said Mr. Ismay. “Many people considered it the most important educational experience in their lives.”

Mr. Ismay went on about Mr. Cowley, “He was a philosopher. He was into student issues.” He gave as an example the outdoor art shows Mr. Cowley hosted on his wooded property. “He’d spend months painting commentaries that were satiric and insightful,” Mr. Ismay said. “He had a sense of humor.

“That, to me, was a way to express his feelings of the world,” he said of the outdoor artworks. “They became collectors’ items.”

Mr. Cowley also shaped the landscape of Altamont — from the gazebo and train station to the preservation of the housing stock. Referring to the old train station that was recently transformed into a library, Mr. Ismay said, “It was Ed’s idea to save the railroad station from destruction.  People bought bonds of $100 each; $5,000 was enough to buy the railroad station.”

Mr. Ismay went on, “He had the idea of planning for the future of the village.” Victorian homes were considered outdated and even ugly in the 1950s, Mr. Ismay said, and Mr. Cowley worked to preserve them.

He also painted pictures of the old houses, one of which appears every week on the Enterprise website.  “His portraits of houses were the socio-ecological means by which the late 20th century village of Altamont, New York was invented out of some eutrophying 19th century remains and a bunch of loose energy,” wrote critic Thomson Littlefield in 1987. “Cowley has made pictures of a lot of old houses. It is as if he rehabilitates them, as if he digs up the old drains and installs a lot of up-to-date plumbing and appliances, sands and polishes the floors, slaps on a couple coats of paint to bring out the more or less lovely Victorian details, lights it all alluringly in the style of Charles Burchfield, and there you are. Fit to live in, as you never thought it could be.”

“Ed was into architecture,” said Mr. Ismay “and saving architecture. He also wanted to stop random visual clutter.”

At the university, for example, Mr. Cowley designed a way that campus pillars could be used as bulletin boards to prevent the haphazard posting of notices.

“He had determination. He was a controversial figure in Altamont,” Mr. Ismay said. “People at one time hated him. People didn’t like the idea of planning.”

Now, though, his foresightedness is appreciated.

“The village mourns one of Altamont’s most famous artists and supporters,” wrote Mayor James Gaughan this week. “Since his arrival in Altamont so many years ago, he has taken a keen interest in the betterment of our community, whether in fostering the arts in the community or in honoring veterans…Ed will be sorely missed.”

His clan

Mrs. Cowley sat on the edge of their bed on Monday, cradling in her hands a small sculpture that had rested on the bedside table. She said her husband had gotten it in Brussels during the war.

“The wife is lying in the empty bed,” she said, describing the sculpture, speculating that the husband — his pillow smooth — is a soldier away at war.

“I thought it was appropriate for me,” she said. “Now we are down to one. It was two for almost 66 years and now it is one.”

She placed the sculpture, gently, back on the table beside the display of treasures she had so carefully arranged.

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Edward Paul Cowley Jr. is survived by his clan: by his wife, Bette Cowley; by his sons, Edward Paul Cowley III and his wife, Karen Cowley; and Paul Edward Cowley and his children, Billy, Kevin and Cierra Cowley; and his daughters, Kathleen Cowley and her children Louis Hall and Kathleen’s first grandchild, Finnegan Edward Hall, Brian Patrick Hall, Emily Reich, and William Reich; and Doris Jalbert and her children Alexandra, Samantha, and Jameson Sherer and her husband, Dave Jalbert, and his children, Kara and Cory Jalbert.

Bette and Ed Cowley’s son, Billy, died before him as did his parents, Edward Paul and Catherine Cowley, and his sister, Margaret Bills.

The public is invited to a memorial service at 1 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 19, with a reception immediately following at the Altamont Veterans of Foreign Wars Post at 11 Mill Street, Altamont NY 12009.

Memorial contributions may be made to your local food bank or to Goodwill Industries International.