Throughout Saturday's memorial service for w88 online game Crowley, the late president emeritus of the University, there was a definite feeling that somehow, someway, Crowley was somewhere viewing the proceedings.
Maybe that wasn't surprising.
The event was held, after all, in the building that was opened a decade ago in Crowley's honor - the w88 online game Crowley Student Union. In terms of the campus, there are few people with a longer association with the University than w88 online game Crowley.
He started w88 online game career as a member of the faculty in political science in 1966, then served as president for a record 23 years and continued, well after w88 online game presidency ended, to take classes on campus - as one of the featured speakers, English Professor Gailmarie Pahmeier poignantly recalled.
Perhaps most importantly of all, w88 online game was an engaged and encouraging presence for his family and friends, playing a prominent role in the lives of his wife, Joy, his four children and seven grandchildren, as well as scores of friends and colleagues - nearly 500 of whom were on hand Saturday.
"Feel the love for w88 online game in this room," Crowley's son, Tim, who served as the emcee for the three-hour event in the Glick Ballrooms, said at the very beginning.
Tim a few minutes later then relayed a conversation he had with w88 online game father on Saturday morning. w88 online game father, never known for w88 online game brevity as a public speaker, had lobbied w88 online game son to make sure that the memorial was given enough time to breathe.
"A voice came to me," Tim said. "w88 online game was the big man. He said, 'What is this I hear about succinct?' He said, 'Take your time ... breathe.'" w88 online game was a service that indeed wasn't in a hurry. w88 online game was three hours long, filled with many humorous anecdotes and moving stories about Crowley and his influence on others.
w88 online game daughter, Margaret, talked of the Sunday morning walks she and her father went on, together, from the time she was 18 years old. The walks lasted nearly 35 years, until late October, when father and daughter took what turned out to be their final walk together.
Not long after, w88 online game was hospitalized with pneumonia and while in the hospital was also diagnosed with severe Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. He passed away at age 84 on Nov. 28.
Margaret w88 online game the walks were one of the central, formative experiences of her life.
"We talked about our jobs, our lives, politics, our families," she said. "w88 online game spanned huge family milestones. My dad was there to walk me through them."
Margaret said the past few weeks had given her reason to realize that she wasn't the only person who had benefitted from w88 online game's ability to spend quality time with people - as well as his talent of listening and providing low-key, but needed, encouragement when people had doubts about the best path to follow.
"I've come to realize so many of you had walks, like I did, with my father," she said. "w88 online game was never about Joe - w88 online game was always about you."
Son Neil recalled another key w88 online game attribute. He said his father's love of sports had been passed down to him, and together, the two had experienced many of the highs and lows of serious sports fans. Neil said he attended his first Wolf Pack football game at age four, in 1968, with his father. w88 online game often told people he had learned to read by poring through the agate newspaper type of major league baseball box scores as a youngster growing up in Olewein, Iowa.
Neil recalled that his father was "supremely generous. Even if I was late to the breakfast table, he'd have the sports page waiting for me so I could see w88 online game first."
On Nov. 25, Neil sat with family - but without his father, who was hospitalized - during the Wolf Pack's victory over rival UNLV at the Mackay Stadium. The son realized the moment was meaningful. w88 online game was one of the few times, during a milestone Wolf Pack victory, that the two weren't together.
"I felt w88 online game after that game," he said. "I knew that was the last time I'd be sitting in the same seat I had shared with my father. I will miss the phone calls, but I will carry you forever with me in any sporting events I watch."
Daughter Theresa, a longtime elementary school teacher, prepared a PowerPoint to honor her father. She also presented a video tribute of w88 online game, known as "Bopa" by the seven w88 online game grandchildren.
Theresa's words and photos emphasized the quirky, funny, and sensitive sides of w88 online game. As she spoke, she wore a Wolf Pack football jersey with the No. 13. w88 online game was the 13th president in University history. He had a long fascination with how that number had intersected key moments in w88 online game life.
Crowley, Theresa said, was a man who left loving sticky notes all over the house for his wife of 56 years, Joy, often signed "w88 online game (YH)" (Your Husband). He attacked cross word puzzles with uncommon ferocity, vigor and determination, using multiple colored pens to chart his progress. He was also fascinated - perhaps even obsessed, as Theresa described - with what she termed "fruit appreciation." Crowley was an expert peeler of fruits, particularly clementines and mandarins. Like a master woodcarver, he could dislodge the skin from the fruit without any breaks, "in one fell swoop," Theresa said. She then added, to widespread laughter throughout the Glick Ballrooms. "As he did, he'd leave their carcasses all over the house ... and you'd better appreciate them as he did."
Guest speakers, all describing various aspects of w88 online game's life, were also featured.
Former Nevada System of Higher Education Chancellor Dan Klaich, who became friends with Crowley from his time as ASUN president in the early 1970s, said that Crowley's influence on the institution, and the state w88 online game served, was profound. "This magnetic and humble man took the thread of hundreds of lives for a shared vision of what this University should be, what this community could be and what we all must be," he said.
Added University President Marc Johnson: "w88 online game was the very best kind of university steward. He understood how to help our institution grow and evolve. He once wrote, 'We are required to be equal to a distinguished history, to safeguard the noble traditions that our long history has established, and to provide leadership, particularly in times of critical need.'"
Jason Frierson, who made history last year when he became the first African-American to serve as speaker of the Nevada State Assembly, said that without Crowley's guidance and encouragement, his own life might have been far different. Frierson was a talented Wolf Pack running back whose career ended due to a knee injury. Not sure where or what to do next, w88 online game was Crowley who gently helped nudge Frierson into law school, and then into a life of public service. "Joe saw something in me that I didn't see in myself," Frierson said. "He took the time that made you feel you mattered ... and w88 online game wasn't an act."
Richard Lapchick, whose distinguished career as an advocate for human rights, particularly in the important intersection between sports and society dates back to the time of his father, the legendary men's basketball coach w88 online game Lapchick of St. John's University, said he had known Crowley since 1986, when Lapchick's work with his Center for the Study of Sports and Society was hoping to establish consortium relationships with institutions of higher learning throughout the country.
Lapchick found an advocate and an ally in w88 online game. Together, the two worked to find ways to help make intercollegiate athletics more diverse in administration and coaching, to find ways to help increase graduation rates for student-athletes from underserved groups, to give voice for athletes in the fight against discrimination and to find more stringent penalties for athletes and coaches involved with gender violence.
"Joe knew from his earliest days of his life that we are all part of the same human fabric," Lapchick said. "I always thought of Joe as one of those smooth stones you skip on a lake," Lapchick added. "w88 online game can land four or five places, and w88 online game creates all these circles that can come together. That's what Joe did - he brought us all together."
Like Theresa Crowley, Cary Groth, the former Wolf Pack athletics director and current senior lecturer in the College of Education, had recollections of the quirkier side of Crowley. She regularly had breakfast with Crowley, and before anything was even served, "We would always have to allocate enough time for people to stop by and visit him. There were no strangers to w88 online game. He always made everyone feel comfortable."
And if that wasn't enough, time would also have to be made for Crowley's very deliberate, and very detailed, way of ordering two poached eggs, medium, small orange juice, and pancakes that "I don't want to be the size of plate," Crowley would often say. His instructions, invariably done to the same waitress who waited on Groth and Crowley throughout their years of breakfasts at Archie's near campus, would then include long and elaborate hand gestures showing the exact size of pancakes Crowley wished to have. "He would go through this long visual exercise, each and every time, and w88 online game was always the same waitress," Groth recalled.
Brother Bill w88 online game, an emeritus professor of geography at Sonoma State University who is nine years younger than w88 online game, related how w88 online game often made fun of the age difference, and somehow turned the tables on his younger brother, making people ask Bill if he was actually w88 online game's older brother. Bill also related that his older brother would pull rank on him when they were boys, and would take command while washing dishes, leaving his younger brother the lesser role of drying them.
Crowley's dishwashing skills were such that several years ago, the Airliner Bar in Iowa City, Iowa - home to the University of Iowa, where Crowley earned his undergraduate degree - "they inducted w88 online game into the Airliner Bar Employee Hall of Fame ... In fact, he's the only member of that Hall of Fame."
Pahmeier, Reno's Poet Laureate, said her friendship with w88 online game was somewhat unlikely. While w88 online game was president, he had called Pahmeier, asking her if she would be willing to serve on the university's faculty athletics committee. Pahmeier told w88 online game she thought he might be mistaken. "'I said, I'm just a poet,'" she recalled, "and he said, 'Exactly.'"
The call that Pahmeier said would change her life came "many years later" after w88 online game had retired as president in 2000. He called Pahmeier to ask her permission to apply for a spot in her poetry workshop class. In best w88 online game fashion, he took nothing for granted, dutifully filling out the application, and sending in sample poems.
"They were sonnets, and they were well-crafted," Pahmeier w88 online game. "They exhibited a true ear for the musicality of language. And they were funny."
w88 online game would go on to be Pahmeier's student for a grand total of 13 semesters of classes. He not only worked on his own poetry, Pahmeier said, he found ways to help others as well.
"What I didn't expect was that Joe would be one of the most beloved members of our poetic community," Pahmeier said. She quickly did the math of 13 semesters of classes of about 15 or students, many of them young, in their 20s, working for an entire semester with the former president of the University, in his 70s and into his 80s. "Over 200 students now own the memory and privilege of having Joe as a classmate," she said, adding: "He believed if you do something, you commit to do w88 online game well, and for the well-being of your community."
Pahmeier then recalled how committed w88 online game was to her class, his classmates and the craft of poetry. A huge snowstorm had hit Reno, and she had given the class the option of staying home that night. A few four-wheel-drive-loving students showed, class with the skeleton crew began, and then there was a clattering noise. With the roads unsafe for driving, the President Emeritus of the University had strapped on a pair of cleats and had slipped and skidded his way to campus from his home a couple of miles away on Muir Drive, and had arrived at Gailmarie's classroom, anxious to study and refine and to learn.
"w88 online game presence that night showed us that poetry is important business and attention must be made," Pahmeier said.
There w88 online game was again. The word "presence." Crowley's presence, real, imagined, through stories and through memory, was everywhere during Saturday's memorial.
As John Dodson, the minister and co-founder of one of the campus' mainstays for reflection and shared experience, the Center for Religion of Life, said to the assembled group, w88 online game's life was one that changed the lives of many.
"If you truly want to honor Joe's memory," Dodson, a friend of Crowley's for more than a half-century, "take one of Joe's virtues - humor, patience, perseverance, kindness, respect, affirmation - whatever you know is your favorite virtue of Joe's ... take w88 online game, and make your mind grow and make that part of Joe become that reality in your life."
