WATERLOO - Friends told Joy Lowe she should choose a larger venue for a memorial service for her late husband, longtime community leader J. Russell Lowe.

She knew her husband would have nothing of that. He was not about laying treasures on himself, but on his community.

Memorial services for Lowe, who passed away early Saturday after a yearlong battle with prostate cancer at age 85, will be 2 p.m. Sept. 21 at Payne AME Church on Mobile Street.

Lowe said her husband did not like calling attention to himself in life or death.

"Russ's favorite expression was, 'Don't telegraph your actions if you want to get anything done.'" Joy said. "I kind of always remembered that and thought that was really neat - don't let people know what you're doing. You get more done."

In an interview late last year, Lowe said if people wanted to know what he was doing, his actions would speak for themselves and they'd find out soon enough.

Joy Lowe said she and her husband acted as one. "We agreed to things one way and sort of stuck with that," she said.

The most difficult struggle, she said, was probably breaking down racial barriers in housing in the 1960s, when she and her husband, an educator with the Waterloo Schools, were trying to find adequate housing to bring more African-American teachers to town, and to the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls.

A small group of blacks and whites finally reached a breakthrough. "We found if you wanted to file a discrimination suit against a landlord for racism, you had to corroborate your story," she said. "So a white couple would go in behind us to rent the same place, and they would find there were openings, and when we were there, they had none."

She said prominent Waterloo attorney and KWWL-TV executive Robert Buckmaster, Courier publisher Robert McCoy and University of Northern Iowa President J.W. Maucker worked with them in ending housing discrimination against black UNI faculty at a housing complex near campus.

Lowe worked many years as an educator in the Waterloo schools as a principal and school board member. "He gave a lot to Waterloo and a lot to the school system, both as a staff person and as a board member," said former Waterloo Human Rights Commission director and Iowa Board of Regents member Betty Jean Furgerson, who served with Lowe on the Waterloo school board.

Lowe also made a difference in the lives of individual students, such as Waterloo native Dwight Bachman, a 1964 East High School graduate and 1970 UNI graduate who became the first black journalist at KWWL in the late 1960s.

"He didn't just encourage me to go to college at UNI; he drove me back and forth to class one summer, every single day," said Bachman, public relations officer at Eastern Connecticut State University since 1990. "He was my adviser and my friend."

Lowe served with many community organizations, including the Black Hawk County NAACP and the Black Hawk County Democrats.

The Lowes were strong supporters of Democrat presidential candidate and former U.S. Sen. John Edwards, who called over the weekend to offer condolences, Joy said. Another prominent local Democrat, former U.S. Attorney Stephen Rapp, now an international prosecutor of human rights violations and war crimes for the United Nations in Africa, stopped on a brief visit home this weekend to visit Lowe in hospice care before his passing.

Lowe also served on the National Cattle Congress board of directors.

"He was on a lot of committees in the city, so he knew a lot of people in town. He could lean on you and you didn't know you were being leaned on," longtime NCC board member Dick Klingaman said with a laugh.

Lowe served on the NCC board through two Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganizations. "He led us through some pretty tough times, and I have nothing but the utmost respect for what he did with the Cattle Congress," longtime NCC board member Ron Pullin said.

For many years, Lowe served as chairman of the city of Waterloo's Community Development Board, which disbursed federal housing and other assistance to disadvantaged sectors of the community.

Joy Lowe said memorials to her husband may be directed to the Cedar Valley Hospice Home in Waterloo.

Contact Pat Kinney at (319) 291-1484 or Pat.Kinney@wcfcourier.com