Mark Crow Scholarship

December 2010

Mark Eugene Crow will be forever young, always a bright-eyed, enthusiastic college student in the minds of those of us who remember him. That’s because he never graduated, never had a chance to fulfill the great promise that was his uniquely.

He was the third son of W.H. and Betty Crow, the longtime publishers of the Clay County Democrat at Rector, and all three brothers, as well as their “baby sister” Cathy, were multi-talented, congenial, filled with potential for leadership in whatever field of endeavor they chose.

All but Mark went on to realize that potential, to live up to their expectations. Mark could not. His life was cut short in a freak auto accident on an icy road near Stuttgart on Jan. 21, 1966, a couple of months short of his 20th birthday.

I say it was a freak accident because many of us have been in worse and survived. He was in Stuttgart to take pictures at the wedding of a fraternity brother. He and two others were on their way to the rehearsal dinner when their car slid off the road and hit a reflector post. That was in the days before seat belts were mandatory, and this car had none. A door flew open, and all three were thrown out. Mark’s worst injury was a bump on the head; one of the others suffered a broken leg. But more than an hour passed before help arrived, and Mark died of exposure.

He and I had become close friends the previous year, his first at A-State and my second. In the fall of 1965 I succeeded his older brother, Wendell, as yearbook editor, and Mark moved up to be head photographer. Another friend and fraternity brother, Dan Stracner, who like me was from Hot Springs, would be assistant editor.

That fall Mark, Dan and I moved into a large room off the old Danner Hall ballroom, a luxury suite compared to what I’d been in previously. Across the hall were two more “journalism jocks,” Marion Meredith and H.T. Moore, who would later go over to the dark side (law school).

That would be a great year for our close-knit band of brothers until an awful night in January 1966.

Hard to believe, but Mark would be 64 now, the same age as me, and I can only wonder what he’d have done with those 40-plus years he has missed.

I can tell you he’d have succeeded at whatever he chose to do. That’s not hard to surmise because he did that in just a few years. As he had done at Rector High School, Mark showed remarkable abilities in his year and a half here — in academics, athletics, student government, publications work and brotherhood (believe it or not, A-State’s fraternities were service organizations in those days, and ours took special pride in scholarship).

After his death I struggled to find some meaning in what had happened and never did. In an effort to cope with our loss and to try to keep Mark’s memory alive, I joined with others in establishing a scholarship fund to be named after him. The contributions rolled in, and by the time I graduated in May 1967, we had enough money to get it started the next year (tuition was only about $100 a semester then so a modest scholarship could still be helpful).

I left it in the hands of others, and I don’t know how long it lasted. But it wasn’t, as I had hoped, perpetual. Tuition rose; the scholarship fund ran dry.

But this spring the Crow family estate and Mark’s siblings re-established the Mark Eugene Crow Memorial Scholarship with an endowment that should perpetuate it. The first recipient was announced last month at the College of Communications Honors Banquet.

Raven Hearton, a journalism major with a news editorial emphasis, was announced as the first recipient. The daughter of Ora Cash and Michael Hearton of Augusta, her career goals are to work as a reporter for a newspaper or magazine.