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Knot Withstanding

Two Members of the Class of ’07 Have a Pressing Engagement
Cathy West and Bob Lowry

Cathy West and Bob Lowry, members of the Class of 2007, have scheduled their wedding for this October.

Catherine West remembers having “only about a five-second conversation” with Bob Lowry that night at the Log Cabin almost two years ago when BusinessWest honored those two and 38 other members of the first 40 Under Forty class.

“It was just too crowded … we barely said hello to each other,” West recalled as she recounted the sequence of events that led to Lowry asking for her hand in marriage last Christmas. (She said ‘yes.’)

Actually, the story began roughly a year earlier, when Lowry, a restaurateur and serial entrepreneur (he has several Mexican eateries), gave a quick talk to the 500 or so students taking West’s ‘Introduction to Accounting’ class at UMass Amherst as part of a program to promote entrepreneurship. That was also a very quick encounter, an introduction, really, with Lowry’s only real recollection being the thought that West, also a part-time tax manager with Meyers Brothers Kalicka, was “young, about my age, and cute … but probably married.”

In truth, West was thinking pretty much the same things about him, she later confided. “He handed out burrito coupons … he seemed like a really cool guy.” She noted, however, that neither had an opportunity — not that they were really trying — to find out anything more that evening at the Log Cabin.

But while that event didn’t exactly trigger this ‘small-world’ romance, the 40 Under Forty program nonetheless played a key role in sparking the union scheduled for this Oct. 11.

It seems that Lowry was scheduled to speak to another of West’s classes a few months after the gala. He told BusinessWest that he called her to discuss the matter, and, sensing what he interpreted as “over-friendliness and a desire to talk to me some more” on her part (something West quickly denied; “that was all in his head”), he searched for a way to keep her on the phone.

He found one in West’s 40 Under Forty profile story, parts of which — specifically her many travels to the African nation of Ghana — he managed to retain. “I cooked up some kind of question from her profile,” he said. “Then we started E-mailing each other.”

Then, Lowry managed to enlist her help to solve some accounting problems for one of his entrepreneurial charges — an encounter that clearly had several motivations.

“And we’ve been pretty much inseparable since then,” said West, fast-forwarding things significantly, but slowing down enough to say that the two first got together on Nov. 1, 2007 at the Esselon Café in Hadley — and hit it off. Obviously.

Actually, those 40 Under Forty profiles did more than provide Lowry with some talking points during that phone call, the two told BusinessWest. They helped pique interest in one another and create some shared ground.

“She had done some fascinating things,” said Lowry, referring to, among other things, West’s participation in efforts to build a business and learning center in the Ghanian city of Secondi. Meanwhile, West, who said she glanced at most of the 39 other profiles, was intrigued by Lowry’s — “his kind of stuck out” — and especially mention of his work in the community, which includes donations of time and energy to Big Brothers Big Sisters, Hampshire Health Connect, and other groups.

“When you read those 40 Under Forty profiles, you think about what the people do and how similar they are to you,” she explained. “And they can appreciate the same things that you do.

“One of the things I admire about Bob is that he really loves to help people,” she continued. “That’s how I feel, too, and it’s really nice not to have to explain yourself to someone — they just understand.”

As for the Christmas Day proposal, West said that, while the two had talked about the subject, she was nonetheless surprised he popped the question at that time. “I wasn’t really expecting it, but it was a wonderful surprise.”

— George O’Brien