EX-MARINE GET HERO'S BURIAL CARRIAGE LEADS LEO MCDOWELL FUNERAL PROCESSION.

Byline: Charles F. Bostwick Staff writer

LITTLEROCK - A white carriage pulled by a white horse carried retired Marine Leo McDowell, a veteran of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, to his funeral Saturday.

A riderless horse, boots backward in the saddle's stirrups, accompanied the flag-draped casket as the carriage preceded by two drummers beating a slow cadence and followed by dozens of cars rolled down 100th Street East to Living Stone Cathedral of Worship, where McDowell was a trustee.

"My husband was such a great man; I couldn't do enough for him," explained his wife, Alice, her voice breaking, before the service. "I wanted to do everything I could to make his send-off, and his homegoing, special."

A Marine honor guard acted as pallbearers and fired a rifle salute over his grave at Eternal Valley in Newhall. A flock of doves was let loose in his honor.

Ill with Parkinson's disease and diabetes the past four years, McDowell died early March 8 at age 78.

Born in Detroit, McDowell was basically on his own after age 13, his wife said. He was taken in by a family in whose business he worked, and at age 17 joined the U.S. Navy.

He concluded that the Navy wasn't what he wanted "It wasn't tough enough," his wife said and after two years, he went into the Marines.

McDowell spent 25 years in the Marines, retiring as a first sergeant after serving in the Korean War and Vietnam. Between the wars, he was one of its first African-American recruiting officers, working out of a Hollywood office.

In Vietnam, he was wounded by a hand grenade that shattered his ankle. The wound ultimately led to his retirement.

Last year, he was placed on 100 percent medical disability because his Parkinson's and diabetes were linked to exposure to the defoliant Agent Orange in Vietnam, his wife said.

After retiring from the Marines, he went to work for the Daylin Corp. in Beverly Hills, then for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and later the Veterans Administration.

It was at the VA, as an equal-employment opportunity investigator, that he met Alice Sims, a VA employee who checked out government cars to employees who needed them.

"He'd come to me to get a car," she said.

One day she saw him in an office elevator, after about a month of not having seen him. McDowell said he had taken time off because his mother had died. Alice remarked on how much she had missed him.

She got off at her floor. McDowell rode the elevator up to the next floor, then ran down the stairs to her and asked her out to lunch. She turned him down, but he kept up for the rest of the week. She finally agreed.

"It developed into a beautiful romance, a beautiful marriage of 30 years never a conflict, just love," Alice said.

Alice was a single mother with two sons and a daughter. McDowell treated her children like his own. "He just became their dad," she said.

The McDowells attended President Ronald Reagan's first inauguration, bringing 32 African-American clergymen and their wives, the result of McDowell's involvement in an evaluation of veterans services in California when Reagan was governor.

The McDowells moved to Palmdale 16 years ago. He became a trustee at the Littlerock church, then called First Missionary Baptist Church. His wife became a supervising agent for the funeral insurance firm Homesteaders Life Company. After his illness became too bad, he stayed on as an inactive member of the trustee and deacon's boards.

"He was a good man," friend Peg Lee said.

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2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) A horse-drawn funeral carriage carries the body of ex-Marine Leo McDowell in his funeral procession Saturday.

(2 -- color) Alice McDowell, wife of ex-Marine Leo McDowell, enters his funeral on the arm of her son, Keith. Behind her is son Moses.

Jeff Goldwater/Staff Photographer