Joe Bowman, Sharpshooter, Dies at 84

It is not easy to whip out a pistol and split a playing card edgewise at 30 paces. Joe Bowman did it routinely, and he had a few more tricks up his elaborately embroidered western sleeve.

Joe Bowman dazzled crowds with his fancy gunplay, performed for royalty and helped train F.B.I. agents and Hollywood stars.

“I remember him throwing a washer up in the air, firing a pistol, and saying, ‘I shot right through it,’ ” said Dan Pastorini, a former quarterback for the Houston Oilers and a longtime friend of Mr. Bowman. “I laughed and said, ‘Sure, Joe.’ So he wrapped a piece of tape over the hole in the washer, threw it in the air and fired again. The tape was gone.”

Joe Bowman, known as the Straight Shooter and the Master of Triggernometry, died June 29 in Junction, Tex., where he had stopped for the night after putting on a fast-draw and sharpshooting exhibition for the Single Action Shooting Society’s annual convention near Albuquerque. He was 84 and lived in Houston.

The cause was a heart attack, his wife, Betty Reid-Bowman, said.

At gun shows and rodeos all over the country, Mr. Bowman dazzled audiences with his fancy gunplay and sharpshooting with pistol and rifle. In one of his more elaborate stunts, he put two lighted candles on either side of an ax blade, balanced a .22-caliber bullet on the blade and then split the bullet with a rifle shot. The two pieces of the bullet extinguished the candle flames.

Mr. Bowman’s way with a gun made him famous. In the United States, he trained television and film actors to draw a gun at lightning speed and twirl a six-shooter with authority. In “Lonesome Dove,” Robert Duvall hefted the heavy Walker revolver once used by the Texas Rangers thanks to lessons from Mr. Bowman.

Traveling the world, he performed for King Hussein of Jordan and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. Home in Houston, he taught local police SWAT teams and F.B.I. agents the technique of “instinct shooting,” a way to fire accurately under pressure by aligning the body correctly rather than pausing to look down the gun sight.

“I’ve seen fast, I’ve seen faster, I’ve seen fastest, and then I’ve seen Joe Bowman,” said James Drury, the star of the 1960s television series “The Virginian.”

“In one five-thousandth of a second,” Mr. Drury said, “he could get off three shots and put them in the middle of a 50-cent piece at 30 paces. That’s about as good as you can get.”

Joseph Lee Bowman was born in Johnson City, Tenn., but spent most of his childhood in Asheville, N.C., where he and his older brother, Mark, would spend Saturdays watching Tom Mix and Gene Autry westerns at the local theater. Infatuated, Joe began working on his own quick-draw and twirling techniques with cap guns and trained his eye by shooting flies off garbage cans with a BB gun.

When he was 12, his father, an auto mechanic, moved the family to Houston in the hope that the climate there would cure Mark’s asthma. Joe, an Eagle Scout, apprenticed at two well-known stores, Roy Smith Boots and Palace Boots, while attending Sam Houston High School.

Immediately after graduating from high school in 1943 he was drafted into the Army, where he served with a communications squadron in France. While stringing telephone wire with his unit in eastern France, one of his platoon mates fell on a land mine. Mr. Bowman, blown backward into a tree, was riddled with shrapnel. While serving in combat, he was awarded three Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart.

After returning home, Mr. Bowman attended the University of Houston for two years, but the lure of the old West got the better of him. He started the Bowman and DeGeorge Boot Shop, specializing in finely detailed tooling that attracted the attention of stars like Roy Rogers, for whom he made a pair of boots with gold toes and heels and red roses on the side.

In 1954, he married Betty Fruge, who knew nothing about guns but learned quickly. She eventually became the North American female fast-draw champion, a distinction that earned her a spot on the television show “To Tell the Truth.” The marriage ended in divorce.

In addition to his wife and his brother, Mark M. Bowman Jr., of Denver, he is survived by a son, Mark, of Austin, Tex., and a daughter, Jan Bowman of Dallas.

While tooling boots and belts, Mr. Bowman indulged his fascination with guns. He developed a special metal-lined holster with a pivot at the belt that allowed the wearer to draw a pistol at top speed. Sammy Davis Jr., one of Mr. Bowman’s many Hollywood friends and a fast-draw enthusiast, bought two sets. Mr. Bowman also gave sharpshooting exhibitions at events like the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.

In the early 1960s he decided to quit the boot business and take his act on the road. Outfitted in a ten-gallon hat, an embroidered shirt and tooled-leather boots, he would begin his shows with a fast-draw and twirling exhibition, passing his retooled Ruger .357 Blackhawks over and under his hands, tossing them in the air and balancing the nose of one of the revolvers on the tip of his finger.

To spice up the act, he did a bit of lassoing and a few card tricks, while telling stories of the old West, a subject he regarded with deadly seriousness.

“Those old westerns were his whole value system,” his son said. “He lived by a code and saw things in a way that just doesn’t exist anymore.

“He could never quite accept a world in which Roy Rogers no longer counted.”

Mr. Bowman told The Houston Chronicle in 1992: “So much of what I do is for the adults, reminding them of their childhood. What I remember is the morality of the westerns and of the cowboys. That’s all that westerns were: morality plays, where there was good and evil. Now look at the movies and on TV: good can be bad, there’s no distinct line. I don’t think kids learn from that.”

The sharpshooting stunts followed. “He could hit an Anacin tablet with a .22 rifle at 30 yards and pulverize it every time,” said Mr. Drury, who often appeared with Mr. Bowman at shows. “Firing with two six-shooters, he could keep two targets in the air until he ran out of bullets.”

In his 80s, he was still eager to drive hundreds of miles to show off his skills at schools and charity events. Somewhere along the way, he became the embodiment of Texas and a vanishing cowboy culture, a transformation that surprised even him.