Carmel, CA Joan Poe Lowry, 97, of Carmel, California, passed away peacefully on February 2, 2025. Joan was born July 29, 1927, in Loma Linda, California, to Arlo and Nadine Poe (nee Merriam). After graduating from Alhambra High School, Joan attended Pomona College, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree focusing on political science.

Setting off on her first big adventure two weeks after graduating, she traveled by train and boat to Stuttgart, Germany, where she served as a recreation director at the U.S. Army’s Vaihingen Service Club from 1949-1951. She continued her service in the U.S Air Force from 1952-1954, with postings at the Mildenhall and Manston Royal Air Force bases in the United Kingdom. She returned to California to work in the Registrar’s office at the Stanford Medical School in San Francisco. She met her husband, Ed Lowry, during this time and they married in 1956.

Joan’s international adventures expanded with her marriage to Ed, with his work taking them to Quito, Ecuador, and La Paz, Bolivia, for several years. They returned to California in 1959 to start a family, living in Terra Linda and Corona Del Mar. Two more overseas assignments followed –a year in London followed by two years in Caracas, Venezuela. In 1969, the family returned to California for good, living in Tiburon for many years. Joan continued scratching her global itch during this time, with frequent travel to the Middle East and Asia. Ed’s retirement brought them to Carmel in 1993.

Joan was a curious and engaged person, always keeping up on global events. The daughter of a judge/lawyer and a schoolteacher, she would often talk about conversations around the dinner table growing up. Her high school years mapped directly to the U.S. involvement in World WarII, starting in the fall of 1941 and finishing the summer of 1945, and she remembered many details from that time. She said she would have majored in International Relations (it didn’t exist at Pomona at the time) and wanted to be adiplomat. She knew she wanted to engage globally and to help people. She got her Army job by writing an unsolicited letter to the State Department asking if they had any positions for someone like her. The State Department directed her to the Pentagon, and that led her to Germany.

Joan is survived by her children, Douglas, of Phuket, Thailand, and Bruce, of San Francisco, California, as well as six beloved grandchildren and three great-grandchildren spread far afield, on the U.S. West Coast, South Africa, Thailand and Australia. Her husband of 58 years, Ed Lowry, pre-deceased her, as did her daughter, Janice Lowry.

Always one to defer attention to others, Joan asked that no services be held. Memorial contributions may be made in her memory to the National Scleroderma Society, which fights the disease that contributed to her daughter’s early demise.