ROBERT LANE CRUIKSHANK: A Very
Decent Man
The marriage proposal of Robert Lane Cruikshank was
not the stuff of which a maiden dreams. "My mother always
told me how I would feel when I fell in love and I don't
feel that way," he said, "but I thought about it and I
decided she was wrong."
Marianne Johnson, sitting in a restaurant in her
low-back black dress with the red cabbage roses, married
him anyway. Why? "Because he was the most decent, the
most solid &emdash; he was just a good man," Marianne
says of her husband of 38 years, from their home on
Manhattan's Upper East Side.
"I make him sound dull &emdash; we had a house in
Stratton that we called Mountain De Open Dour, I was the
`open,' he was the `dour' &emdash; but he was fun. You
could trust him. Grown men have been here crying. He was
a rock to everyone we knew."
Robert, 64, father of two, was a vice president of
Carr Futures and worked on the 92nd floor of the north
tower.
He and his wife had a home in Beaver Creek, Colo., and
he was, his wife says, "very sportif" &emdash; he loved
tennis, skiing and golf. He sometimes joked about
quitting and going on the senior tennis tour, but the
truth was, he loved what he did.
A special time? "He once decided to surprise me and
planned a trip to Rome, the entire trip," Marianne says.
"It was two weeks, which for Cruikshank was a very long
time, because the world was waiting for him to work."
.
