Should you be of the opinion that it is just a tale of nostalgia that had a cute, but short life span, that it happened so long ago it couldn’t have generated much of a legacy, well, Cynthia Wilcox can offer testimony to how wrong you’d be.

The life and times of her father, Eddie Lowery, still inspire.

As the 10-year-old caddie for Francis Ouimet in the 1913 U.S. Open. As the successful owner of a car dealership. As a respected amateur champion and a golf insider who lived at Pebble Beach, sat on USGA committees, and counted Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan, and Ken Venturi among his closest friends. As a man of great spirit who mourned the death of not one, but two wives, then suffered through enormous heartache when his son, Eddie Lowery Jr., was killed in a training mission plane crash while serving in World War II.

Wilcox, long settled in the Boston area, knew those chapters and accepts that they are part of the legend people know about.

But it’s the memories she cherishes – “He used to watch me ride horses and I used to shag (golf) balls for him” – that aren’t as well known by the public but make him a hero to her.

“Growing up as a kid, I didn’t think much about his life, but now it hits me,” said Wilcox. “He overcame a lot of odds in his life.”

And with a selfless decision as he neared the age of 60, Lowery made sure that a new-born baby girl wouldn’t grow up against long adds. By 1962, Lowery had married for the third time, to Margaret, who was his secretary, and they decided to adopt two infants, John and Cynthia.

With Lowery enormously successful by this point in his life, the family lived in San Francisco until Cynthia was about 6, when they moved to Pebble Beach, and later Rancho Mirage – tucked between Palm Springs and Palm Desert.

Classic photographs, including some from the 1913 U.S. Open, are a reminder that Cynthia Wilcox had a very special father who is connected forever to one of sport's greatest stories.

“I took for granted my lifestyle,” said Wilcox, who concedes that she nothing about Francis Ouimet, the 1913 U.S. Open, or her father’s role in history at that time of her life.

“But I knew he was a very good golfer, and that he was a big deal.”

There were summers when Cynthia would work for her father and got to see what made him a champion golfer (two Mass. Junior titles, one Mass. Amateur) and she laughed when told the details to her father’s victory in the famed Bing Crosby Pebble Beach Pro-Am.

It was 1955 and Nelson – long retired from active play but willing to come out and play the Pro-Am – was struggling with his game and thought of withdrawing. But for the sake of his friend Lowery, Nelson teed it up in the final round, only to “rip up his card,” according to reporters, because Lowery didn’t need his help. At 195, they won by one and their closing 63 was almost all Lowery.

“He was very, very competitive,” said Cynthia. “My dad had an edge to him and he could really tease people.”

But away from the work and away from the golf, Lowery was a father who connected with his daughter. She came to study him and to appreciate how “he was a person who learned a lot by watching other people,” she said.

“I think it was golf. I think it was the people he was friends with at Cypress Point, at San Francisco Golf Club, at Augusta National. (All his friends) had that in common.”

And then there was this man named Ouimet.

“The only thing my mom would ever talk about was Francis Ouimet and how he was the nicest man she ever met in her life.”

When the decision to come to the Boston area for college (she went four years to Pine Manor, graduating in 1983), it brought her a greater awareness to her father’s upbringing.

“He was (the second oldest of) seven kids and they lived in a tiny, little two-bedroom house in Newton. Their dad died when they were young, all the kids had to work to help their mother, and they were a very, very close family.”

Eddie Lowery was 81 when he died in 1984, by which time Cynthia had decided to make the Boston area her home. “I’m not sure he agreed with that,” she laughed, but, oh, the wonderous way life works.

Because she was in the Boston area, a force of nature, the late Denny Goodrich, sought Cynthia out and told him of his passion for this thing called The Francis Ouimet Scholarship Fund. She was intrigued.

“I went to the (annual banquet) and met Barbara (McLean) and Jane (Salvi), Francis Ouimet’s daughters, and their husbands. It is incredible, that this story has continued for more than 100 years.”

Cynthia’s husband, Tom Wilcox, and her children, James and Allie, have met Ouimet’s grand-daughter, Sheila Macomber, and her husband, Ed, and their daughter, Caitlin Wallerce. All of it is such a marvel.

“It’s really, really amazing this generational story,” said Cynthia. “My son goes (to the banquet) and his friends are supporters.”

In 2000, when the U.S. Open returned to Pebble Beach, the USGA was going to honor Byron Nelson. He and his wife, Peggy, wanted Margaret Lowery, then battling cancer, to be there with them and plans were made. Cynthia and Tom went out, too.

Such symmetry, such a beautiful way to return to Pebble Beach and “Byron and Peggy were unbelievable,” said Cynthia. But as fate would have it, Margaret Lowery could not make it and a few weeks later she died.

Years earlier, Margaret Lowery had told her daughter what a gentleman this Francis Ouimet was and now she knew that to be so true. She knew that he had one hell of a caddie, too, and that together they wrote a story that lives on.