Steve Crowe

In honor of turning 60, I tried to list 60 things I’ve said or written over the years. I could come up with only 40. I’ve stayed away from the profound mostly because I haven’t said too many profound things. Age 3 1. “He who can’t laugh at himself has no right to laugh at all.” – High school yearbook quote 2. “Gotta go, bye.” – Last words I'd say to reporters just before I slammed down the phone on deadline 3. “Sometimes I look at the clutter in my study and on my workbench and think, 'I could become a street person.'” 4.  “I say if he can assure us that he hasn’t eaten any flies or lapped water from a mud puddle in the past five years, we let him come to the reunion.” – Comment on Facebook regarding a "lost" classmate who did exactly those things in elementary school 5. “Everyone knows how terrible it is when teachers boss you around in the hallways. With student monitors, you’ll have your friends bossing you around instead.” – Seventh...

Every presidential election season, I think back to eighth grade at WGJHR when I was the campaign manager for the Gold Party. The Blue Party had lost all but one seat the year before and was determined to not let that happen again. They put up posters all over the school and asked students to vote for them. Meanwhile I advised that we should remain cool and confident. At the all-school assembly, members of the Blue Party went up and down the aisles and threw candy out to everyone, and every time a Blue candidate paused in a speech, someone up in the bleachers banged a kettle drum and everyone cheered. In my speech, I told the students that we had no tricks, no treats for them, just a great lineup of officers that would do some good for the school. We lost. Big time.

A year earlier, this "face" of Eastover owner George Bisacca was on the body of a fat Hawaiian, not Caesar. The first time I met George Bisacca was almost the last time. I had been working as a busboy at the Eastover Resort for a year when the head waiter learned that I could draw caricatures. He asked me to do one of George, the owner of the resort, for an outdoor billboard eight feet high and 16 feet wide. It was part of a Hawaiian theme buffet on the south lawn for Labor Day, the last day of the busy summer season. The food was set up on tables in front of the billboard and the background of the mural was in plain sight. But a strip of brown paper covered a two-foot by 5-foot section in the middle, leaving 500 guests to wonder what was underneath. Just as the dinner was to be served, the head waiter, Dick Sweeney, got the crowd’s attention, then gave the signal to a staff member, who ripped down the covering. There stood a caricature of George Bisacca as a ...

This mannequin is a likeness of me in 1975 and was in an American history museum at Eastover Resort in Lenox, Mass. My brother David and I worked there for several years and changed the faces of two mannequins to look like ourselves.  When the resort closed in 2010, the owner, Tiki Winsor, gave me my mannequin (David's was sold unfortunately!) and it now guards a pool table at a cabin in the Berkshires. The painting in the background is part of a series of panels on American history that David and I painted in 1974-75, which used to be in the office of the resort.

Thirty-five years ago today I was on pins and needles wondering if I had blown it with a sweet 'n' sassy woman I was pursuing. I had sent her a dozen roses with the message "Will you be mine?" and both the florist and my roommate had laughed and asked, "Is this a proposal?" When the woman didn't call or write me for two weeks, I took it as a sign that she wanted to cool things down a bit. But later I learned that she liked the flowers and thought it was "sweet" of me to send them. It would take several more months to wear her down and win her over, but eventually she agreed to be my wife. Last night, on Valentine's Day, I asked her: "On June 24, 1978 (our wedding day), you answered 'yes' to a long and serious question. What did you mean by that? And do you still mean it?" And she answered: "I'll answer the second question first -- 'Yes!' As for the first question, 'I have no idea!'" I sa...

I am standing in line, boxed in by my two teenage sons, waiting to board what I will later call the last roller coaster ride of my life. Batman: The Ride, at Six Flags Park in New Jersey, is a network of colorful tubing. It drags its riders ski-lift style up 10 stories high and then whips them 50 mph along a half-mile track, through five head-over-heel loops and a zero-gravity roll. The ride takes paying customers to death’s door, gives them a peek inside, and then snaps them back to life.  I do not look forward to this. I read signs warning people not to ride if they are pregnant, prone to dizzy spells, have a heart condition, or have suffered a neck injury. I zero in on the last two. I do have a very slight heart murmur, and I’m pretty sure that ride officials will not let me get on if I say, “I was wondering if the fact that my heart stops beating for a split-second every now and then might be considered a heart condition?” And the fact that my neck goes snap, crackle...

Years ago, when I was leaving my job as city editor of a small daily newspaper, some of the younger reporters made a mockumentary about me. They called it “Gotta Go, Bye!” because when I was on deadline and they called me from a satellite office, those were the last words I’d say before I slammed the phone on them, in a rush to get back to work. The scenes in the “film” were all based on actual things I had said or done, so it was doubly painful. In one scene, a reporter comes into my office and says, “Steve, I think you’re being too hard on our intern, Eric.” My character, extremely mellow, even lethargic, says: “No, I don’t think so.” “Did you tell him that his article was the worst piece of crap you ever saw?” “I don’t remember saying that,” I say. “Well, here’s a printout of an email you sent him.” (Camera zooms to printout of email – the exact same email I had sent to Eric the intern. The words “piece of crap” are clearly visible.) My character pushes the paper asi...

For the second Christmas in a row, my mother (right) said goodbye to a sibling. My Aunt Margaret died just before 1 p.m. on Christmas Day; their brother, Robbie, died on Christmas eve a year ago. Both were 90. The three of them became closer than siblings in their later years, friends who called each other daily, ate dinner at each others' homes each Tuesday night, and w ent out to dinner to celebrate birthdays. Fortunately, my mom, who's 85, is not the only survivor of the dinner club. My father's sister and my uncle (just 80) are still around, but they're feeling the loss of good friends too. I told the three of them that we're taking next Christmas off and going on a cruise. Anyone who's think of checking out of this planet next year will have to do so two weeks before Christmas or two weeks after! This morning we buried my aunt in a beautiful park-like cemetery where all the markers lie at ground level. To get to my aunt's grave for the committ...