Billie L. Lewis Dowell was born in August 17, 1930, in Grayson, Kentucky, to Archie Dowell and Eulah Brammell Dowell. The family moved to Michigan in the mid-1940s and she was a graduate of Lansing’s J.W. Sexton High School with the Class of 1948. She then attended Lansing Business University.

She got her first job as a legal assistant to H. Donald Bruce in Lansing. Billie married Jerry Dowell in 1951 in Holt and the couple had three children. By 1955, she was hired by Secretary of the Michigan Senate Fred I. Chase as his secretary. As secretary to the Secretary of the Senate, Billie worked in the Michigan State Capitol and was at the center of much political action in the 1950s and 1960s. About Billie, Chase said “she has the happy (there goes that word again) faculty of getting more things done with less fuss than anyone I know… I’m constantly amazed at the amount of work she turns out with no excitement, no worry. She’s even-tempered, has a fine personality to work with.”

When Chase resigned as Secretary of the Senate in 1961 to become Secretary to the Michigan Constitutional Convention, Dowell joined him there as executive secretary of Con Con. She worked the two years at the convention, again in the midst of history as delegates from across the state wrote Michigan’s current constitution. After the convention, she left fulltime government and legal work and focused on her family life in Holt.

For twelve years, about 1957 to 1969, Billie and Jerry owned and operated Midway Ashland Oil Co. in Holt. Billie’s husband Jerry died at age 38 in 1969. Following her husband’s death, she sold the business and turned back to public service.

In 1972, Billie ran for office for the first time for Delhi Township Clerk to succeed her sister Enid M. Lewis. Enid had been Delhi’s Clerk from 1961 to 1972, resigning to take on the role of Ingham County Register of Deeds. Billie was elected Delhi Township Clerk and served in that position until 1977. When Delhi Township’s Supervisor Michael Walkington resigned in 1977, her colleagues on the township board appointed her to complete his term. Dowell is, to date, the first and only woman to serve as Supervisor of Delhi Township. She was subsequently elected to her own term as Supervisor in 1980 and retired from the position after the 1984 election.

In 1974, she co-founded the Ingham County Women’s Commission with Debbie Stabenow, with whom she co-chaired the commission. The future U.S. Senator was in her first term in public office as an Ingham County Commissioner, representing southwest Lansing.

As Delhi Township Supervisor, Billie was a force in local politics. Among an array of accomplishments to her credit, is the placement of the Holt Library in a permanent building. She accepted the donation of the old Sanderson home on Holt Road from developer Francis Fine and worked with Trustee Paul Goulet to raise funds and arrange labor and material contributions to add onto the building and open it as the first handicapped accessible public library for the community, also with public restrooms.

Upon her retirement from Delhi Township in 1984, Billie purchased Lambert’s Bridal in Downtown Lansing. She moved to Pentwater fulltime in 1989 and took on a role with Community Corrections in Mason County, where she remained until her retirement in 1991. Billie Dowell died November 17, 2003, in Pentwater, Michigan. She is buried alongside her husband in Maple Ridge Cemetery in Holt.