The Tampa Tribune from Tampa, Florida • 151

Symbols It's his mountain, after all, and he can'j jolly well put a cross on top of it if he wants to. i "If it's like a billboard for Christianity, then good," he said. "I want to influence people. I'm a Christian and proud of it. I have very strong beliefs and will stand behind them.

Everyone ought to stand up for what he believes in. Everyone ought to have standards. But they don't anymore and that's one of the things wrong with this country." Sumter Lowry BY KEITH COULBOURN Sumter L. Lowry has the happy faculty of being a sort of stick figure, uncomplicated, basic, definite about the indefinite and straightforward about the devious. He falls comfortably into the old English Colonial Tradition.

Rudyard Kipling and all that. This old type they're common in the legions of ex-military commanders set out to pasture made almost a religion of Duty and all the things or ideals they supposedly defend. That fine old breed, living in the pale of Victorian morality, was wound up and set in motion toward something impossible to attain. And that was their life: Duty, dedication, belief, a certain tragic frustration. Yes, and a full-tilt forthrightness to so much of the ideal that they lost themselves True Believer fashion in a cult of manners and the super-simple.

Life was a show for them. But they took it very seriously. Or they pretended to. They cultivated big, stagey voices for keeping people at a distance, elaborate systems of courtesy and protocol, rules above all, rules, rules for everything because it all became rather like a game. Certain key moments are photographed, framed and hung on the wall, love is suitably summed up in a monument and anything can be stopped in flight by a Such is the way of symbols.

Sumter L. Lowry believes in them, he lives by them, he makes them and he is one. In his side yard, for instance, is one of his symbols, the heart of a cypress. About four feet in diameter, the cypress heart is sunk 10 feet in concrete and stands 18 feet high. Sumter L.

Lowry claimed the huge old cypress while helping build Florida's Camp Blanding near Starke some years ago. It must have been an inspiration to him, this giant of a tree. "I told them to save that tree for me and I would come back for it when I could," said Sumter L. Lowry. "The tree had to go to make way for the camp.

And they did save it for me. Later I got it and had it brought down here and installed. It's a symbol." He was leaning against the cypress heart with that very fine look of a man who owns something thoroughly, who possesses it and has found some meaning something of himself, indeed, in the thing. It was also the look of a man quite content to let the symbol speak for itself. "What does it mean?" he was asked.

"It means," he said, "that we should stand straight and tall for the things we believe in and do what we think is right regardless." Sumter L. Lowry, himself a symbol, alone marched in Tampa's last Veterans' Day Parade. Others in the parade rode in cars. "There were only about 100 of us," he said. "They said they would get a car for me, too, but I said I didn't want one.

I said I would march. It's the least we could do for all the young men fighting and dying in Vietnam." His marching was symbolic of his moral support of U.S. troops in Vietnam, but not of the war itself. He disagrees entirely even violently with the way the war is going. He also disagreed with the conduct of the Korean War after Gen.

MacArthur's removal. He blames the civilian leadership in Washington from President Johnson on down. Sumter L. Lowry's position is easy to understand: If we're in a war, let's win it. And if not, what are we doing there? The worst thing we can do is let it just peter out like they're trying to do.

If we can't win, let's quit fighting and pull out. But before we do that, let's realize that we're the strongest nation in the world, that Russia and China aren't about to get involved in a real shooting match "that's absolutely a lot of hooey" and that if we want to win all we have to do is let our military leaders actually lead. Besides all this and perhaps even more important, there's such a thing as pride in one's country, a desire to be best, to be right all the time. And, by jingo, when your country is best, you want it to stay that way. But this doesn't square with the Cold War interpretation, of current events.

So Sumter Lowry says there is no Cold War. There's war and there's peace, he says. The Cold War is Communist propaganda. Sumter L. Lowry has probably gone to more trouble to get a response from the President about all this than any other man in history.

He's published two full-page ads in The Tribune and issued a 14-page booklet, all in the form of open-letters to President Johnson. It cost him thousands of dollars. And President Johnson doesn't even answer. "It's downright rude," says Sumter L. Lowry.

"And it's also bad politics." Now Sumter L. Lowry isn't the sort of person to discuss these things with, really. He doesn't sit down with the idea of exploring the subject of international relations. He's already explored it and he's already come to his conclusion. He came to it more than 20 years ago maybe from the moment he was born and it hasn't changed one iota.

The only thing that's changed is his mass of proof. He documents everything. "I don't go off half cocked," he said. "That's why people don't question me. I'm right, I know I'm right and I will not believe otherwise." Hi lliillils mmmmmmmm aiiiiiiiisiiiiiii Does that make evervone else wrong if Sumter L.

Lowry's most publicized symbol, perhaps is his six-story illuminated cross atop a mountain he owns near Waynesville, N.C. It's the Mt. Lyn Memorial Cross on Mt. Lyn Lowry, elevation 6,280 feet. The mountain is named for Ivilyn Ingram (Lyn) Lowry, the Lowry's daughter who died of leukemia in 1962 at the age of 15.

The cross can be seen for 40 miles. The electric bill runs to $50 a month. Now here's the picture: If you like mountains and woods and all that, you go to North Carolina. You go there to get away from it all. You want to get back to nature.

But what you see rising above it all, looming there in all its super-civilized symbolism, is Sumter L. Lowry's cross. It's like a billboard. He was asked if anyone had complained about it. "Complaints?" he said.

"No, I don't think so." He thought a moment. "A few people seemed to think I might have spent the money on something else." "Any complaints," he was asked, "about the cross possibly spoiling the view up there?" "Spoiling the view? The cross?" Sumter L. Lowry repeated the key words as if they simply didn't make sense together. And perhaps they don't. The people up there not only haven't complained about the cross, he said, they like it.

It's not a tourist attraction. But it's a place to go. A lot of people go there, he said. They hold religious services. Later, he said, he'll build a "rustic chapel" there.

they don't believe him? Yes, it does. But there's no bitterness here. Sumter L. Lowry says that's your right. And it's his right, he says, to try to convince you to his way of thinking.

He has an almost religious fervor to convince you. Indeed, there's evidence that Sumter L. Lowry has combined religion and patriotism to some extent. Nothing sacrilegious, of course. Bible and flag often go together.

During one of his speeches to a Tampa civic club 20 years ago, for instance, he said: "Let us not forget the teaching of the Bible: 'What profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own which we might interpret today: 'What profit America if it gathers the wealth of the whole world but loses its freedom to the Russians." Money, possessions and status in the i i 1 Phot Aacast Staebler 8 Sunday February 26, -1967 Florida Acctml.