To die of kindness

A giant among men, Dr. Porter Crow, has passed on. Our media (in this case The Palm Beach Post) didn’t even bother to address him as Professor Crow, or Dr. Crow, but only Mr. Crow instead. It’s a shame that our society is falling apart in front of our eyes and we remain helpless in our futile attempts to make a positive change.

No matter how we look at things, we always come to the same conclusion – the Media is evil. It is our only Satan and Devil incarnate. All our struggles will remain unrewarded with the few exceptions like (written much better than) this one.

Why is this man so important, you may ask. The full list is endless. I can give my view which barely scratches the surface. I was privileged to have sat with him for a good two or three hours and I have learned more in those three hours, than I did in my 26+ years of formal education.

Dr. Crow was an erudite scholar who has devoted his love to his students. His vast knowledge and love for the matters taught was simply passed on to his class. Many of his students comments are exactly based on what he once pronounced having said that the professor is not a rule-maker, but rather a map-maker. Deceptively simple, but true, concise, effective and objective. Show them the road – the travel they have to do on their own – that’s it.

I had a (mis)fortune of having been born outside of the United States and my knowledge differs a great deal compared to Dr. Crow’s, but when your spirit is as free and unhindered with conventionalities you transcend all those man-made difficulties, borders, languages, etc. etc. He had the capacity to hear it all, absorb it right away and make a new amalgam of mixing all the elements into a new alloy not known to mankind before his time. My deepest concern is that we fail to recognize such people before they are gone. We did the same with General George S. Patton, Jr., William Tecumseh Sherman, Ronald Reagan, etc. etc. The views of the people current with heroes of such magnitude is often clouded by some strange atmospheric occurrence (our own stupidity) – rush to turn in the article on a deadline, lack of experience, lack of knowledge, lack of care and compassion for what we do. That is the only explanation why this article here at Baltimore IMC exists. It is to point out that the conglomerates like COX communication (owners of PB Post) are an impediment to the development of mankind, driven only by profits, advertisers, deadlines and nothing else. Essence? What a joke. Who cares about essence? Who even reads papers these days? Well, some of us “old farts” still do.

I remember that I read Dr. Crow’s remarks about the quality of writing in depicting WW2 (where he earned his purple heart). He was finding it objectionable that the presence of minorities and women was so evident in news footage, reports, films, etc. that he remarked “this is not history – this is wishful thinking, the demographics of those days were such that you couldn’t have so many minorities, so many women in the armed services – we are doing ourselves a disservice”. Admittedly, this could not be a very popular standpoint – but truly in the vein of Dr. Crow’s impeccable integrity. There is no force on Heaven or Earth that would get him to be politically correct at the expense of the truth. That’s what a native of Texas, Dr. Porter Crow was made of. I know that there are other similarly outstanding Americans but I fear that they will get the same shoddy evaluations by some low-grade “journalist” as Dr. Porter did. I am strongly opposed to mediocrity, lack of professionalism and haste in which we live our daily lives today. Had it not been for our “rat-race”, maybe my dearest friend (and in-law) Dr. Porter Crow would have received a more befitting eulogy – obituary, or article. I hope I have made a small dent in my desire to unearth the essence of Dr. Porter Crow.

But let me finish with a most “Porterlike” example from the last days of his life. As his health was getting worse and worse (colon cancer), he refused to loose his good spirits and high hopes, not that Texan. Only a few days prior to his passing was there a 24 hour hospice arranged to care for him around the clock. In his household there was a strong belief that Dr. Crow, husband, father and most decent person I ever met, was able to breath a sigh of relief and let himself die as not to disturb the remainder of the living he had left behind – therefore he just died of kindness as he willed his own death not to impinge on the life of the persons dearest to him. What man is there that can reward his loved ones by the way of his own dying? No man. Except Dr. Porter Crow, a native of West Palm Beach, professor at Barry University, son of a Texas preacher with another 13 siblings – that’s who. Just read the writebacks in the guestbook the PB Post was wise enough to post and you'll get the idea: www.legacy.com/PalmBeachPost/GB/GuestbookView.aspx

Thank you for the time you devoted to me Porter. There will always be candle lit in your honor in the cathedral of my memories.