While at SHS, Mark Lowmiller ’60 served as president of Student Council his senior year and vice president his junior year. He played football, ran track, was a member of the Biology Club and represented the school at Buckeye Boys State. He captained the 1959 Northern Ohio League football championship Whippets. Mark became interested in medicine while studying biology and, after graduating, earned his bachelor’s degree in biology at Dartmouth College. He then studied at Dartmouth Medical School and Johns Hopkins Medical School where he earned his M.D. in 1967. He completed medical internships at Baltimore City Hospital and McGill University in Montreal. Afterward he moved to Colorado to do his residency in internal medicine at the University of Colorado.
From 1973-75, Mark served in the Army as a physician at Fort Carson, Colorado and then worked as an emergency room doctor until moving to Seattle to do another residency, this one in anesthesiology, at the University of Washington. For the last 25 years before his death from a heart attack on March 11, 2005, Mark lived and worked in Seattle.
Away from his medical work Mark was a prolific reader and ardent adventurer who loved to travel, ski, sail and scuba dive. He took particular joy in raising national championship black Labrador retrievers; his dogs Tully and Banner were national field champions seven and four times, respectively. He also was an accomplished falconer and trained a red-tailed hawk and a goshawk. In addition he enjoyed cooking and raising orchids. Mark also narrated books on tape for the Blind Library and volunteered at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo where he administered anesthesia to gorillas, bears and orangutans.
In the words of a classmate, Mark “maintained an abiding friendship with many of his Shelby classmates.”
His nominator: Anne Stevenson Benninghoff ’60. His presenter: Tom Baker ’60.