In the Emerson Cultural Center, home to an old converted Bozeman grade school named after writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, there is a
renovated auditorium that functions as a hub for entertainment downtown. Major
musical acts have taken the stage there. So too have opera performers, school
bands and choirs, remembrances held for the departed, a parade of famous public speakers and movies showing as part of the Bozeman Film Festival.
The Crawford Theater is named to honor two
benefactors, Tim and Kathy Hansen Crawford. The former will be penning a
regular column for Mountain Journal called “Citizen Crawford.” Ask yourself: What do you get when you cross a fiscally
conservative businessman and connoisseur of fine sporting guns with progressive
instincts, who once had a bumper sticker made that read “Armed and Liberal”?
Readers of MoJo
will soon find out.
High Country News once described Crawford as "an all-around maverick."
“I was born on the eve of WWII. I spent my
formative years in Los Angeles during the war and the great postwar expansion
coincided with parallel growth of smog," Crawford told MoJo recently. "It did not take long that from a growing
aversion to the toxic qualities of sprawl, traffic and urban air developed a
desire to find better environments."
Few readers, including those who may think they
know Crawford relatively well in Bozeman, are familiar with the breadth of his
life experience. His family were co-owners of Santa Rosa Island, today
part of Channel Islands National Park, located off the coast of Santa Barbara.
He was exposed to ranch life as kid, growing up hunting and fishing, while gaining a classical education. Later, following a few years of Jack Kerouac-like adventures on the road, he headed north and served as a
publicly elected commissioner for the city of Ketchum, Idaho, the place in the
West where Ernest Hemingway lived and died.
Ultimately, Crawford's desire for a wilder nature led
to Montana. “A move to the Bozeman area some decades ago seemed damned fine,”
he said. “Somehow the more deleterious effects of rapid urban expansion have
followed me. I think the Mountain Journal
is a good avenue to express my sentiments of why the excesses of urban development
are toxic to quality of life. I have seen them firsthand.”
Crawford's rule: If you are going to move to a place, become a responsible citizen by educating yourself about its special qualities and then fight like hell to prevent them from ruin by people who don't know any better.
MOUNTAIN
JOURNAL: You spent your childhood in and around Southern California. How would you describe the transformation of landscape that has
occurred there and what are a few of the warnings you would offer to human denizens
of Greater Yellowstone?
TIM
CRAWFORD: Having grown up and spent a good bit of my
life in Southern California in the postwar years of rapacious growth, and
seeing almost all the natural environment sacrificed to development, I became
inured to growth as a shibboleth of value. So I would advise those who share my
love of the natural existing values in the Greater Yellowstone area to beware
of those who promote bigger as better. And to my fellow citizens, I encourage
them to vote for folks who will recognize that most developers’ promises are of
chimerical community value.
MOJO: How does your life
experience inform your thinking about what it means to be a citizen?
CRAWFORD: My early life was spent in an economically secure and
emotionally insecure setting. My parents divorced and with father going off to
war, I lived with my grandparents. I have no memory of my father for most of
the first decade of my life, but plenty of remembered impressions of war fear
later supplanted by the worry of nuclear war.
Not a secure foundation. I do remember, with
some fondness, of somehow getting a job at about 12 years old, riding the bus
several miles to a gun store where I was paid the handsome sum of 25 cents an
hour to clean the fingerprints of customers from the guns. The store was
frequented by all manner of adventurers, from Spanish-American war vets to
Hollywood folk.
MOJO: What was that like?
CRAWFORD: Heaven for a young person already longing for adventure beyond
the confines of an ever-less pleasant city. My family sent me off to a private
school that had a lot of outdoor activities and then to a college prep school,
where as strange as it must seem now, we could hunt and trap. Summers were
spent doing ranch work, bucking hay, fencing, ditch digging and horse breaking
with the odd bit of cattle doctoring and of course fishing—often supplying
trout for my family’s dinners with their friends.
I got on to firefighting crews in the Douglas
fir country of Northern California, followed by a stint in the spruce and
tundra north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska. I could go on at length about the
odd jobs and places I have worked since becoming an early college dropout in
the fabled ‘60s. I think I would prefer to touch on some of these in future
tales. Suffice it to point out, an amazing number of jobs a person can have,
held in a life of ineptitude.
MOJO: You live on a farm in the Gallatin Valley, you have a ranch out
near Roundup and are a businessman in downtown Bozeman, owning the building at
the corner of Main and Tracy. You were among the first entrepreneurs decades
ago to carry out a major historic renovation. Why did you believe in Main
Street when so many modernists were abandoning downtown and saying Bozeman's future
and destiny resided out in the strip developments of North 19th?
CRAWFORD: I am fortunate to have a quite wonderful small ranch in the
Gallatin Valley which is a fairly comfortable distance from Bozeman, though the
development seems to be creeping inexorably toward us. This ranch is a real
jewel consisting of about half its 350 acres of land which I farm with relative
seriousness and the remainder untillable, perfect for wildlife, the propagation
of which I take as a challenge to maintain if not improve through the control
of invasive weeds. A great life providing core is a couple of miles of the winding
and braided East Gallatin River.
Crawford is revered by his friends for the number of thought-provoking, mischievous bumper stickers he's created over the years. This one, which adorned the bumpers of many of his pals' vehicles (from pick-ups to Subarus), always turned heads.
MOJO: You believe in
ecological, historic and property restoration.
CRAWFORD: My properties truly are a
great match for my mixed natural and cultural interests. I acquired a building
in downtown Bozeman about the same time as the farm. It was a badly treated old
brick bank building covered with odd yellow and brown paint. Inside it reeked
of permanent hair conditioner, having been a place for the teaching and
purveyance of women’s uppermost beauty and cheap bad haircuts for those
aspiring to work in hair parlors. With my building manager’s help it became the
second old building refurbished from new to approach its old comeliness.
MOJO: A lot of people are grateful for you helping to rejuvenate the
spirit of downtown.
CRAWFORD: I was and still am amazed that people have stopped me on the
sidewalk and thank me for its transformation. What seemed a good idea at the
time has now morphed into a level of re-gentrification by people whose
pocketbooks enable and far exceed the elegance of utility.
Unfortunately, this growing extravagance
necessitates much higher rents and has resulted in the replacement of many old
locally-owned family businesses with the newer trendy shops and restaurants so
comforting to the tastes of those more newly arrived in our community. Who and
what does Bozeman serve? I will expand on this in future forages.
MOJO: Some also may not realize that you are a professional nature
photographer and occasionally have showings of work around town. How does
your perspective behind the lens shape the way you think about landscape?
CRAWFORD: I have been a working photographer for almost five decades, now
concentrating on my own views of nature. I occasionally exhibit locally, often
finding most folk think my community involvement is primary to my life’s photo
work. Oh, well! My work in architecture and nature has given me some serious
thoughts about size, color and proportion in community buildings, also best
left to elaborating on in another time and column place.
MOJO: A few years ago you helped underwrite the cost of restoring the
main theater in the Emerson Cultural Center and you spearheaded an effort to
have solar panels installed on the Emerson's roof. What's the most frustrating
thing for you about the state's approach to climate change, coal, and renewable
energy?
CRAWFORD: One of my quiet pleasures is the Emerson Cultural Center of
which I was an original founder. It has been a real enjoyment seeing it develop
into a cornerstone of the community, providing cultural enjoyment and
expression for all ages in a historic building of continuing compatibility with
the community. Several projects of grandiose and ill-suited proportions, at
least to my sensibilities, have been presented by developers in Bozeman over
the years and many have lost momentum. Some people are trying to transform our
town into a place that’s lifted from the playbook of other ruinous communities.
The history and tastefulness of the Emerson speaks to the values most of us
savor about Bozeman and I’m proud to have been associated with it for the last
twenty-five years.
MOJO: As for your belief in the future of renewable energy?
CRAWFORD: Renewable energy isn’t
just good for the planet. It’s smart for business. The Emerson has a roof top
solar energy system which provides 20 percent of its energy use, not bad for a
less than tight building serving people coming and going day and night. This is
a significant example of renewable power in a recycled public building which
should help expand demand for much more of the same.
MOJO: As a MoJo columnist,
you're going to write about whatever suits your fancy, but you'll be drawing
upon your background, mentioned above, and delving into politics, observations
about growth, gun ownership, and other topics, sparing no one. When it
comes to literature and social commentators, who are a few of your favorites of
the moment?
CRAWFORD: In light of the foregoing, I am, in this moment, following the likes of Bill
McKibben and James Hansen with their writing about climate change and hopefully more of Paul
Krugman and Naomi Klein.
