John Crowe: Athlete Who Feared
Heights
John
Crowe made friends the way he played sports: for
keeps.
"We were still friends with people he went to grammar
school with," said his wife, Pam. "He has friends from
his first job that we still see. Clients that are no
longer his clients that he still saw for dinner or lunch.
He went on golf outings with former clients. His entire
life has somehow been intertwined with friendship."
That extended to his relationship with his two sons,
now 29 and 26. "They also became his friends," said Mrs.
Crowe, a manager at a law firm. "They would golf together
and kayak together."
Mr. Crowe, 57, a benefits consultant for Aon
Corporation in the World Trade Center who lived in
Rutherford, N.J., was such an eager athlete he sometimes
pushed his body further than it could go.
"He played softball till he had so many injuries I
begged him to quit," his wife said. "He broke a finger,
he did something to an ankle, severed a tendon on his
50th birthday playing basketball."
Mr. Crowe did have one fear, though: heights. "You
couldn't get him on a ladder," Pam Crowe said. "But he
felt perfectly safe on the 101st floor. He'd call once in
a while and ask what the weather was like and I'd get
annoyed and say, `Look out the window.' He'd say: `I
can't see. I'm above the clouds.'"
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