Howard Robert Higgins / Birch (1927–2019)

Relationship: Grandfather (maternal; born Howard Higgins, later Howard Birch)

Desert Son, Military Veteran, Electrical Engineer

Howard Robert Higgins was born on September 15, 1927, in Tucson, Arizona, the only child of James Everett Higgins (1892–1938) and Doris Pauline Kuthe (1902–1996). His birth certificate tells a story of separation before it even began: while Doris listed her residence as Tucson and her occupation as "Housewife - Teacher," James's residence was recorded as San Francisco, California. The couple had married less than a year earlier, in November 1926, but by the time their son arrived, they were already living on opposite ends of the coast.

The baby was initially recorded as James Everett Higgins—likely a placeholder using the father's name before a proper naming—later amended to Howard Robert Higgins.

A Desert Childhood

Young boy at Agua Caliente Hot Springs, 1930s

By late 1928, when Howard was barely a year old, his mother made a decision that would shape the rest of his life. She placed him with Robert and Sarah Birch, a couple in their late fifties who operated the Agua Caliente Hot Springs resort in the remote Gila River desert of Maricopa County. Doris had been part of the Birch household since at least August 1926—voter registration records show her living at Agua Caliente three months before her marriage to James. The Birches were not strangers; they were trusted friends.

Robert Birch was a Canadian-born pioneer who had operated saloons in Prescott before Arizona's prohibition drove him to the hospitality business. His wife Sarah was an English immigrant. Together they ran a 22-room adobe hotel that catered to railroad workers, health seekers, and travelers along the Southern Pacific's Sunset Route. It was here, among the mineral springs and desert sunsets, that Howard spent his early childhood.

A Network of Care

Howard's upbringing was not a simple handoff from one family to another. Recent discoveries reveal a flexible family care network that included his biological family.

His maternal aunt, Jessie Velma Kuthe Rosser, had established herself in Silver City, New Mexico, by 1920. She married Willis A. Rosser Sr. in 1922 and had a son, Willis A. Rosser Jr., in 1923—making Willis Howard's first cousin, four years his senior. Anecdotal family evidence indicates that Howard and Willis spent time together in New Mexico during the 1930s, though the exact dates remain unclear. Willis may have been like an older brother to Howard during those years.

And Doris did not disappear. On September 26, 1929, when Howard was two years old, the Arizona Republic noted: "Doris Higgins visits Agua Caliente - Doris spent Sunday with Burch family." On April 7, 1933, when he was five, the Casa Grande Dispatch reported that "Doris travels to Agua Caliente to visit her small son Howard." These documented visits—and likely many more that went unrecorded—prove that Howard's mother maintained a relationship with him throughout his childhood.

Phoenix and High School

By April 1935, Howard was still living at Agua Caliente, as recorded in the 1940 census's "previous residence" question. But by 1940, at age twelve, he was living in Phoenix with the Woodard family at 1517 Almeria Street. The census lists him as a "lodger" in the household of R. Waldo Woodard, a manager, along with Woodard's wife Maisy and sister-in-law Elsie Parkman, an art teacher.

Why Howard left the Birches' resort for the Woodard household remains a mystery. Robert and Sarah Birch were still at Agua Caliente in 1940—Robert, then seventy-one, was working eighty-four hours a week running the resort. Perhaps the arrangement was about education: Phoenix offered better schools than the remote desert. Perhaps it was part of the broader care network that had always characterized Howard's upbringing. The Woodard connection may have run through the Rossers, the Kuthes, or the Birches themselves.

Howard attended North High School in Phoenix. The 1944 yearbook shows him as "Howard R Higgins"—still carrying his birth name at age sixteen or seventeen.

Military Service and a New Name

Young serviceman at Air Force base, 1940s

On January 18, 1945, at age seventeen, Howard enlisted in the military. Both Navy and Army records exist, and the exact branch and duration of his service remain subjects for further research. What is clear is that when he emerged from military service, something fundamental had changed.

By the time he married Patricia Anne Mowrey on June 17, 1949, in Maricopa County, he signed the marriage certificate as Howard R. Birch. The transition from Higgins to Birch had occurred sometime between 1944 and 1949—perhaps during military service, perhaps in preparation for marriage, perhaps as a quiet acknowledgment of who had truly raised him. Robert Birch was still alive in 1949; he would die the following year. Howard's choice of name honored the man who had been his father in all but blood.

Marriage and Family

Patricia Anne Mowrey came from pioneer Arizona stock—her father Raymond Robert Mowrey had prospected for gold and run the Sultana Bar in Williams, Arizona. She and Howard built a life together that would span sixty years.

They had three children:

Even as a young husband and father, Howard pursued his education. He enrolled at the University of Arizona in Tucson, studying electrical engineering while raising a family. On May 27, 1953, the Arizona Republic announced his graduation—Howard R. Birch, age twenty-five, with a degree in electrical engineering. The GI Bill likely made this possible, transforming wartime service into peacetime opportunity.

A Long Life

Howard's electrical engineering career took him far from the Arizona desert. He worked for General Electric Company, with assignments that brought the family to Schenectady, New York—GE's historic headquarters—and later to Whittier, California, where the 1960 census finds them in Los Angeles County. But Arizona called them back. By 1984, they had returned to Tucson, where Howard would spend the rest of his life.

The losses accumulated in his later years. His biological father James had died in San Francisco in 1938, when Howard was ten—though whether Howard knew of this at the time remains uncertain. Robert Birch died in 1950, Sarah Birch in 1959. His mother Doris, who had visited him as a child and maintained a lifelong friendship with the Birch family, died in 1996 at age ninety-three. Patricia, his wife of sixty years, died on April 4, 2009. His son Michael followed on July 4, 2010, at just fifty-two years old.

Howard Robert Birch died in 2019, in Tucson, at the age of ninety-two. He had lived long enough to see great-grandchildren carry forward the Birch name that he had chosen as a young man—a name that connected him not to the father who had left before his birth, but to the family that had raised him in the desert.

Howard's story is one of resilience, adaptation, and chosen family. Born into circumstances of separation, raised within a network of care that spanned relatives and friends and multiple states, he built a life that honored both his origins and his upbringing. The unnamed baby recorded on a Tucson birth certificate left the world ninety-two years later as Howard R. Birch—a name earned through love, not law.

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