Messages spoken at various Camps Farthest Out by Colonel Heath “Bo” Bottomly.
Colonel Heath “Bo” Bottomly was a West Point graduate and Air Force fighter pilot who flew in the Second World War, Korea, and Vietnam. At fifty, while commanding a fighter wing in Thailand, he came to Christ through a radio telephone call with his eldest son.
After retiring from the Air Force, he spent twelve years traveling the world with Campus Crusade for Christ. At Camps Farthest Out, he became especially interested in young people. He founded the California youth adventure program and taught campers to keep a daily journal. He had started keeping one himself when he was thirteen.
Bo was born September 30, 1919, in Chinook, Montana, one of nine children. His father, R. V. Bottomly, was a lawyer who became Montana’s attorney general and later a justice of the state supreme court. “I grew up in Chinook.”
Bo said he first found God when he was four or five years old, at his grandmother’s windmill on the Montana prairie. “And that’s where I first found God.” When he was thirteen, Bo joined the Boy Scouts and began keeping a journal. His mother made sure he continued. “Son, I’m not the mother of a quitter.” He never quit.
On a family trip to Glacier National Park, his father caught him at the Triple Divide, pushing melting snow from one watershed into another. His father used the incident to teach him something about changing the world. “You change this world, my boy. By changing the hearts of men.” Bo answered: “And I said, papa. I will do both.” He spent the rest of his life trying.
Bo graduated from the University of Montana and from West Point in 1944. During the Second World War, he flew P-38s in the Southwest Pacific under General Douglas MacArthur. He married Elizabeth, whom he called Betsy. “I landed the first fighter on Clark Field on the return.”
After the war, he commanded a squadron in Japan and flew combat missions in Korea. In the 1950s he studied at the American University of Beirut and served on the United Nations armistice commission in the Middle East. He later attended the RAF Staff College in England.
Vietnam brought him back into combat. In 1967 he commanded the Combat Dragon task force, which tested the A-37 at Bien Hoa. In 1969 he was commanding the 355th Tactical Fighter Wing at Takhli, Thailand. He had spent his adult life becoming very good at what he did. He had not yet learned that he needed Jesus.
At Takhli, Bo was fifty years old and, by his own description, a proud and self-made man. His eldest son, Roc, had become a Christian while attending the Air Force Academy. Then came a strike that Bo thought might cost him his career. He called Roc at Purdue on the military radio telephone. His son led him in prayer. “I was led to Christ by my eldest son when I was 50 years old.”
The next day, a general showed Bo that the strike had in fact been authorized. Then the general said something Bo never forgot. “You were saved by the grace of Almighty God. And don’t you ever forget that.”
The change in Bo was obvious to his family. One of his sons later described what he saw: “After Dad became a Christian, the most impressive thing to me was the tremendous gentleness and tenderness and new humility that characterized his life.” The fighter pilot had not become less strong. He had become different.
Bo retired from the Air Force in the mid-1970s and met Bill Bright. He began traveling with Campus Crusade for Christ. “I began my career, which lasted 12 years, as a traveling evangelist for Campus Crusade for Christ, largely military bases and ships at sea all over the world.” He told the story of his conversion in Prodigal Father, published in 1975, which was also made into a film.
But there was another part of his story that he did not hide. Bo had been drinking for years, including during his years of ministry. His two sons eventually put him into an alcohol recovery program at Scripps in La Jolla.
When he came out, they knelt with him on the grass outside and prayed that God would take away his desire to drink. “It worked. God answered that prayer and I never again had the desire to drink.” For a year he attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings near Scripps. He spoke about it openly at CFO. “I’m a recovering alcoholic.”
He later wrote Dishonored Glory, drawn from his Vietnam journal, and Blind Glory. His sense of humor survived even his first attempts to make sense of the Bible. “I thought that Deuteronomy was one of those two hump camels that the wise men rode from the east.”
Bo’s first CFO was Alliance Redwoods in California, where he came on a scholarship. He noticed that the camp had no real program for its young people. So he started one. “And we set up the youth program that is now the adventure program in most of the California camps.”
With his second wife, Penny, he developed a wilderness program for teenagers in the Trinity Alps of Northern California. The teams brought together church kids, kids at risk, and young people from juvenile hall. Bo and Penny also served on the council ring of the Mount Shasta camp. He took Southern California young people to other camps and helped get youth programs started there.
He had seen enough of life to know that CFO could not simply serve the people who were already comfortable in church. He warned the camps: “If we don’t get some young people enthusiastic about living the life of Christ, we’re going to die of old age.” Rex Schrolucke thanked him for that work years later. “And he’s raised them up and he’s brought us to life.”
Bo became a regular CFO speaker in his later years. He spoke at Arizona Grand Canyon in 1993 with Alex McCullough. Alex admired the way Bo could combine experience with words. “But Bo writes beautifully. He speaks like a literary man.”
Bo spoke at the annual meetings in 1994 and 1995, at Hilltop in Pennsylvania in 2000, and at Florida Family in 2001 with Rick Sizemore. At the 1994 annual meeting, Earl Tyson roomed with him. Earl noticed something about Bo’s discipline even in the smallest things. “He crawls in his sleeping bag, hands like this, and in the morning he’s still there. That’s just a man of control and discipline.” Bo could be disciplined because he had spent a lifetime practicing. But he also knew that discipline without surrender was not enough.
At every camp, Bo taught people to keep a daily journal. A journal, he said, was not simply a diary. Each day’s story was another pearl. The days became a necklace. “Keeping a journal is an incredibly sacred discipline.”
He and Penny offered a scholarship to any student who kept a journal without a gap all the way through high school. The practice went back to that thirteen-year-old boy in Montana whose mother would not let him quit.
Bo taught more than journaling. He taught persistence. “Life is a climb. It’s a struggle. It’s a glorious climb to higher ground.” And when the climb became painful: “We get smashed down, knocked around, scuffed, bruised. But we get back up and spit out the blood and fight on.”
He taught that prayer was not limited to words. “Prayer is every act of love. Every single act of love is prayer.” Even in old age, Bo was still willing to be challenged. At eighty, he told Penny not to try to change him. She had a ready answer. “Honey, don’t you want to get any better?”
He kept leading youth retreats into his nineties. The boy who had found God beside his grandmother’s windmill had spent a lifetime climbing, fighting, writing, loving, and learning to surrender. Bo Bottomly died at home in Winchester, California, on October 24, 2016. He had never become a quitter.
*Note:
Many speakers lived before the days of the internet and many had very limited biographical information available. The information in these biographies came mostly from transcripts of their messages, and relies heavily on their own spoken words. Please contact us if you have any corrections.