More About Gina Bowden-Higman (1916-2007)

In 1938 while Kirt was at Yale Gina beat future 1948 Olympic mentalist Gretchen Kunigk (later Fraser) in a major race on   Mt. Rainier.  Gretchen was the first American (man or woman)  to win an Olympic metal in skiing.

Kirt and Gina Bowden were clearly sweethearts during Kirt's high school years in Seattle and for most of Kirt's time at Yale.   I have no idea why their relationship didn't last but both would marry others.  Gina married Bob Higman in 1939 in Seattle and Kirt married Betty Hulburd in 1942 on the east coast.  However, they would remain close through out their lives and in a number of ways they would lead parallel lives.

While Kirt was making a name for himself skiing at Yale, Gina was winning ski events in Washington (see photo at right).   And Gina wrote about Kirt during their college years on opposite coasts.

Like Kirt,  Bob Higman would spend many years working in aviation (for a company named Canadair) and would move his family to the Montreal, Canada area in the early 1950's.  Periodically, though not frequently, during the 1950's the Hine and Higman families would get together, we visiting them in at their home in Canada on the St. Lawrence Seaway or them visiting us in New Jersey.    The Higman's would have 4 children.   Bob Higman would semi-retire about the same time as Kirt and Bob and Gina took up sailing a 44' Catamaran ("Tormentor") in the Caribbean in the years Kirt also spend there in the late 1960's and 1970's.  Occasionally their two yachts would cross paths and it's rumored that Kirt an Gina had a affair once in the Caribbean.

I have photographic evidence that Gina visited Kirt's former wife Betty (my mother) in California in the early 1970's some years after Betty had remarried after her divorce from Kirt.

Bob would become involved in boat building venture (Tanzer sail boats) and the Higmans would eventually move back to Seattle.  In the later 1980's and 1990's my brother Greg would get reacquainted with Gina and, after Bob's death, visit her occasionally when on business trips after she retired to a live-aboard power boat at a marina north of Seattle.

Gina (known in later years as Ginnie to her family) passed away in 2007 at age 91.  After her death I connected via the internet with her son Jim (who I'd known from our 1950's family visits) who indicated that at the age of 80 she had been still adventurous enough to be both parachute and bungee jumping.  She also took a ride around that time in a WWII eara AT-6 trainer aircraft, an adventure that I'm sure must have reminder her of flying with Kirt in the late 1930's shortly after he obtained his pilots license.