 He graduated from the Washington State Normal School at Bellingham (now Western Washington University) in 1923.Bowmer attended the University of Washington in Seattle in the 1930s, acting in at least two of its Shakespeare productions, "Love's Labor's Lost" and "Cymbeline" under guest director Ben Iden Payne, an Englishman whose ideas for neo-Elizabethan staging of Shakespeare's plays provided inspiration later in Bowmer's life as he began producing the plays that became the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.In 1931, Bowmer was invited to become an instructor in English at Southern Oregon Normal School, a predecessor to Southern Oregon University, in Ashland, Oregon.