[2][3] Accounts of Lowrie's life prior to imprisonment are scarce; he held various jobs ranging from bookkeeping and stenography to working as a traveling salesman.

[4] The coin turned heads and two hours later Lowrie found himself entering the house of a well-to-do family, stealing a sleeping man's watch and a purse containing sixty dollars.

[4] Another five years of parole ahead, Lowrie started to write down his prison story under the auspices of the San Francisco Bulletin.

[5] With his writings, Lowrie is said to have inspired Thomas Mott Osborne, an industrialist from New York, in prison reform work.

"[5] On December 4, 1917, Lowrie married twenty-five-year-old Mildred Irene Dean in Brooklyn, New York.

Two weeks later, on June 24, 1925, he died at the Phoenix, AZ home of a local architect, R. B. Dick Redington, who housed him at the time.