Michigan Oral History Library Obituary
John D. Shaw----Crane Obit
Dr. Maurice A. Crane, Michigan State University Distinguished Professor, former Head of the G. Robert Vincent Voice Library and founding member of the Michigan Oral History Association, died in East Lansing, MI on June 1, 2014. He was 87.
In April of 1962, the Board of Trustees of Michigan State University accepted the gift of G. Robert Vincent’s collection of 8,000 recorded voices. In May, Vincent formally reported to work as Curator of the new National Voice Library of the Michigan State University Libraries, a collection of historic speeches and interviews dating back to 1888. By the time of his retirement in 1973, the Voice Library had grown to 1,000 hours of recording time and included the voices of over 30,000 persons.
In January 1974, at Vincent’s retirement, Dr. Maurice A. Crane became Head of the new G. Robert Vincent Voice Library. Under Crane’s direction, the Voice Library grew to over 30,000 audio tapes and records, representing over 40,000 hours of audio recording and by the time of his own retirement in 2000, the collection included the voices of over 100,000 persons from all walks of life.
Maurice Aaron Crane was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1926 and graduated from Atlantic City High in 1944.
After teaching himself to play the clarinet by listening to Benny Goodman records, “Mush” Crane, as he was known then, spent many nights in his high school years playing professionally in nightclubs on Atlantic City’s famed boardwalk. These were clubs that he was much too young to enter as a paying customer.
“I lived in a town where high school kids either became lifeguards or jazz musicians, Crane later told Ed Zabrusky of MSU University Relations.
“When I was very, very young, for 25 cents you could hear Count Basie or Artie Shaw or Glenn Miller, or whoever was at the Steel Pier, all day long. Those were my heroes. I know other kids at that time had heroes like Lou Gherig or Joe DiMaggio, but these were mine. I wasn’t interested in DiMaggio until he got married.”
After high school, he entered Princeton University as part of the United States Navy’s “V12” scholarship program which would lead to medical school. At Princeton, this plumber’s son went to class with the children of the rich and powerful and once had dinner with Albert Einstein.
Deciding to forego a medical career, Crane left Princeton in 1945 and entered the wartime Navy as an able bodied seaman. He served aboard an attack transport, but did not let his naval duties interfere with his education, as he taught himself French by reading racy novels on the fantail of the ship.
Dr. Crane entered the University of Chicago as a master’s degree candidate in English literature in 1948, after passing the requisite exams allowing ex-servicemen to skip an undergraduate degree.
He was joined at Chicago by his high school sweetheart Elayne Neff and they both received their M.A.s and were married in 1950.
That same year, the Cranes moved to Champaign-Urbana and the University of Illinois, where Dr. Crane started a teaching assistantship and research which would lead to his Ph.D. in 1953. His dissertation was on an obscure novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, who Crane, of course, called “Nat King Hawthorne, much to the chagrin of his dissertation committee.
Hired to teach freshmen communication skills at MSU in 1953, he moved to the University’s groundbreaking Humanities Department in 1956. Designed to teach the classics to sophomores from all majors, the department was considered by many to be the best on campus and one of the best of its kind in the United States.
In the 1950’s, he also became one of Public Television’s first on-screen personalities, hosting several programs on early campus TV. These included “Literature Unbound” in which he discussed books on the air each week and an interview show in which he spoke with such luminaries of the day as Father Malcolm Boyd, jazz great Al Hurt and social activist Dick Gregory.
Dr. Crane was made a full professor in 1967.
Even as he was building his academic career, Crane continued to work in show business. He kept his union card up-to-date and played professional gigs all over the Lansing area and around the state of Michigan.
In 1970, he formed the legendary faculty Dixieland jazz band, the Geriatric Six Plus One. The Geriatric Six became an integral part of MSU culture and played at every home football game and funded its own endowment for music students.
Much of Dr. Crane’s time at the office was spent on the telephone and when he answered by saying, “Hello, this is the Voice Library, how can I make you happy?”, he meant it. He was there for MSU students, major networks such as the BBC, NBC or CBS, radio stations, media production companies, scholars and anyone else who called or walked through the door. He was sought out as an expert on popular culture, oral history, jazz and many other subjects and served users well beyond the boundaries of the Voice Library collection.
When he wasn’t talking on the telephone, Dr. Crane was recording. He recorded constantly, traded with other collectors, received donations from people’s attics and interviewed others in the Voice Library recording studio. He did the same things Bob Vincent did to build the collection, but he did them faster, faster than anyone will ever be able to do again. He recorded enough magnetic audio tape to stretch from New York to San Francisco.
In 1983, Dr. Crane produced a three cassette collection on the speeches of FDR for the Book of The Month Club. He was nominated for a Grammy, in the historical recording category, for this production in 1984.
In 1979 he was awarded MSU’s Distinguished Faculty Award, the University’s highest faculty honor. The award recognizes excellence in teaching and scholarship.
Dr. Maurice A. Crane, good and sensitive man, shameless optimist, brilliant scholar and teacher, oral historian, jazz musician, and consummate raconteur, is survived by his wife Elayne, his children and his grandchildren and great grandchildren.