Remembering Charlie Crow
By Roy Ockert Jr.
My friend Charlie Crow, at age 79, died peacefully on Christmas night in a hospice room at Little Rock, surrounded by family.
It has been said that anyone who dies on Christmas goes straight to Heaven because the gates are open that day. Of course, that’s impossible to confirm, but Charlie didn’t need a special ticket. If anyone ever earned admission, he did.
Charles T. Crow was one of four children of Wendell H. and Elizabeth F. Crow, longtime editors and publishers of the Clay County Democrat at Rector, where Charlie was raised. The three brothers became fellow members of Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity at then-Arkansas State College and journalism majors. Charlie was the first and became president of the first pledge class of the A-State chapter.
The second, Wendell C., was editor of The Indian yearbook when I joined the staff as assistant editor, and the youngest, Mark, was chief photographer when I became editor. Their sister Cathy was the fraternity’s unofficial sweetheart during her time in college.
I grew even closer to the family after a tragedy in January 1966. Mark, one of my two roommates in a Danner Hall suite, was killed in a vehicle accident on an icy road near Stuttgart, where he had gone to photograph a fraternity brother’s wedding. He was a couple months short of his 20th birthday, full of potential, and his sudden loss was a shock to all of us.
Although Charlie had graduated before I arrived at A-State, we shared our memories of Mark over the many years afterward, right up to the week before Christmas, when I visited him at the hospice. The truth is that Charlie and Mark looked a lot alike, at least in their youth, and their voices were similar. In Charlie, as we grew older, I imagined that’s how Mark would have been.
Charlie had a distinguished career, starting with four years as a U.S. Army counterintelligence officer. He then went into government service, starting with the staff of Gov. John Connally of Texas. In 1972 he returned to Arkansas to join the cabinet of Gov. Dale Bumpers, as the director of the new Department of Planning.
Not long ago Charlie reminisced about that time on his Facebook page: “Serving in Dale Bumpers' cabinet was the best professional experience I ever had. He kept the best interests of the state at heart at all times, and he made sure everybody who worked for him did, too. He had a great sense of humor, but he did not suffer fools. He was a man of principled values and unquestioned ethics, often reminding us that we must conduct ourselves ‘like Caesar's wife — above reproach.’ …”
After that he held executive positions in several fields — finance, recourse management, waste to energy and finally for various nonprofit organizations. A true Renaissance man, he was an accomplished singer and songwriter, even collaborated with two others in writing and staging a musical about a freed slave and inn owner and her daughter, set around the Brooks-Baxter War during Reconstruction Arkansas. After he and wife Anne retired in Little Rock, Charlie became a leader in organizing a Central Arkansas songwriters chapter.
He also became familiar figure to his many Facebook friends. A voracious reader, he believed in passing along articles, pictures and political cartoons that he thought his friends should see, along with his own take in many cases. An unabashed Democrat and liberal by Arkansas standards, he could argue his points amiably, even if those who disagreed with him couldn’t.
He told me during our last conversation that his career had been shaped in large part by the brotherhood that started at A-State. Indeed, that brotherhood was responsible for a journey we took to Indianapolis in mid-October. The national fraternity planned a memorial service for a beloved former executive director, George Spasyk, who had been instrumental in founding our chapter here and became close to the Crow family.
Charlie and I joined with three other brothers, Warren Dupwe, John Phelps and H.T. Moore, to drive up for the event in Warren’s van. Charlie came to Jonesboro a day earlier, taking in a football game and spending the night with Pat and me. I joked that Charlie and I just went along to hear three lawyers talk, but we all reveled in telling stories and reliving our memories. I laughed until tears came.
Only three weeks later Charlie was hospitalized with a serious bacterial infection. Various regimens of antibiotics over the next month gave some hope for recovery, only to fail finally. He was moved to the hospice a week before Christmas, and he accepted his situation with the grace that was ingrained in his character.
As the unofficial correspondent for my high school class and fraternity alumni organization, I have become accustomed of late to delivering mostly sad news to my peers. I dutifully distributed the obituary on our listserv and posted in on Facebook. Within minutes the tributes started rolling in, and they continue still.
A memorial service will be held Jan. 20 in Little Rock.
Roy Ockert is a former editor of The Jonesboro Sun, The Courier at Russellville and The Batesville Guard. He can be reached at royo@suddenlink.net.