Stanley Crawford

On January 25th, 2024, the night of the wolf moon, Stanley G. Crawford, feeling every one of his 86 years, chose to “check out,” as he put it, from Planet Earth.  For 22 days prior, many dozens of friends drove up the muddy driveway at El Bosque Farm in the village of Dixon to say their goodbyes, shocked, saddened, all but bewildered by the news that he had suddenly fallen into the unyielding grip of cancer.  

Stan led many lives, not only as the author of 11 effortlessly stylized books of adventurous, often satiric, award-winning fiction and regional non-fiction, as a garlic farmer (for over 50 years), as an environmental activist (commitments that stretched from the Los Alamos Study Group to the presidency of the Santa Fe Farmers Market), as father to Adam and Kate (AKA Atom and Katya) and as husband to the late and unforgettable RoseMary, and—to look way back—to his time as a student at the Sorbonne where he wrote his thesis in letter-perfect French on Proust, as a young expatriate wandering seemingly everywhere before settling most happily in Molyvos on the not quite mythical island of Lesvos, where he has said he felt all his senses and the hidden resources of his body flourish. 

When young he taught in Colombia—and half-a-century later, as an accomplished writer, lectured inspirationally at Colorado College and at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  Surely part of his enduring passion for classic cars (and tractors) lay in his underlying need to explore his never-reckless desire for plowing through and harvesting the conditions of existence, whether in the earth or on the page. 

He leaves behind an old Bentley and a Ford Model T he’s been restoring, one more book and a handful of essays to be published, thirty-nine animals of various sizes and species, two grown children, and umpteen indelible memories for all who knew him of a roving intelligence that never dimmed, until the Doctor drove up the driveway with a registered potion that will, one hopes, allow his spirit another sort of freedom.

Arrangements by Rivera Family Funeral Home. To share a memory, please visit our website at www.riverafuneralhome.com