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.  

Maurice Crane did not create the G. Robert Vincent Voice Library.

That fell, predictably enough, to G. Robert Vincent, a recording pioneer and avid collector of voices, starting from the day in 1912 when he showed up at the home of Theodore Roosevelt and convinced him to give an impromptu pep talk to “the American boy.” Fifty years later, Vincent donated his archive to Michigan State University and became its curator.

Crane was his successor, a popular professor of humanities, polymath and local TV and radio personality, and he built the voice library from what was essentially an archive into a public resource, one of the largest and most utilized academic voice libraries in the nation.

He opened its card catalog to the public. He instituted a policy of lending copies of recordings that weren’t under copyright. And from the time he took the job in 1974 until his retirement in 2000, he recorded incessantly, expanding the library’s holdings more than twentyfold. He used to describe his work as "looking for diamonds in a dung heap."

“What Dr. Crane did was take a small private collection which was very important, but popularize it, make it accessible, and add to it at an incredible rate,” said John Shaw, who worked as Crane’s assistant for 26 years and now heads the voice library himself.

His former boss “was always the smartest person in the room,” he said, “and he was always the best person in the room.”

Maurice Aaron Crane died on June 1 in East Lansing. He would have been 88 years old Friday.

Crane was a big personality, a walking encyclopedia of jokes, a man who could hold a room. He played clarinet in Atlantic City clubs as a teenager, on Lansing’s WJIM-TV (and in a Howell roadhouse) as a young professor and at nearly 200 MSU home football games with the Geriatric Six Plus One, a dixieland band he’d formed while in his 40s.

He attended Princeton University, but didn’t graduate. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1944, but never saw combat. He got a master’s degree at the University of Chicago and a doctorate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He wrote a dissertation on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Blithedale Romance” and went on to teach all sorts of other subjects.

He taught the “Great Books” on public television, hosted a show called “Passing Through” on which he interviewed notable people who came to MSU’s campus, the likes of comedian Dick Gregory, LSD guru Timothy Leary and Tran Le Xuan, better known as Madame Nhu, the de facto first lady of South Vietnam.

Abigail Barr, one of Crane’s four children, credits her father with the fact that she walks “like a crazy person.”

“I developed a walking style that involved trying to keep up with a six-foot-two father.”

She credits him with the fact that she learned to speak French.

“My father used to try to hide conversations from the kids by talking to my mother in French, a language that I now know he spoke poorly,” she said.

But she credits him mostly with being a good person, expansive and generous with his attention.

“He was brilliant. He was funny, over the top funny, but he was also extremely kind,” she said.

“There are people who are truly just head and shoulders above other people, and sometimes you’re made very aware of that and you feel unworthy and so forth. I think my father always made you feel like you were his equal.”

The watchword of the voice library, Shaw said, is that “the spoken word is something beyond the written word.”

Crane was fascinated with the spoken word and the qualities that sound recordings capture that are hard to express in print, "people who can deliver speeches, people who hesitate, people who stutter,” as he put it in a 2005 interview with the Lansing State Journal.

He also talked in that interview about the flubs, gaffes and pregnant pauses that seldom make it into the historical record, about the 1961 speech in which Adlai Stevenson told the United Nations that Fidel Castro had "circumcised the freedom of the Catholics of Cuba,” about an interview in which Dwight Eisenhower was asked what contributions Richard Nixon had made as vice president and responded with a long, long pause.

The recordings in the voice library preserved not just words, but emotions, tics, humor. Humanity, really.

"In the world, we tend to divide people into do-ers and talkers," Crane said then. But, often enough, doing and talking are the same thing.

There is no more honorable man than the agnostic who does the right thing just because it is the right thing to do, with no expectation of gaining a more glorious mansion in heaven through his actions or avoiding an eternity in a boiling pit of fire.  

My Dad was such a man.

  

About Dr. Maurice Crane

Dr. Maurice A. Crane became Head of the new G. Robert Vincent Voice Library in 1974, after Vincent’s retirement.

Crane was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1926. He received an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. He came to Michigan State University in 1953 and taught Humanities for many years.

As Head of the Vincent Voice Library, Crane stressed both building the collection and opening it to the public for research. 

Crane recorded incessantly, adding voices from all subject areas. Under his direction, the collection was strengthened in every discipline and most notably in the speeches of U.S. Presidents, labor history, popular culture, the history of Michigan State University and intellectual and political history. By the time of his retirement in 2000, he had grown the collection twenty-fold.

One of Dr. Crane’s first actions upon taking over the collection was to open the card catalog to the public for bibliographic access. The collection also became a lending library as copies of items without copyright restrictions were loaned upon request.

As a reference librarian, Crane became an information source for scholars, broadcasters and radio and television producers from around the world. He was called upon for help in using the collection, but also for general advice about history, popular culture and media production.

In 1984, he received a Grammy nomination for his cassette volume on the speeches of FDR and in 1979 was given the Distinguished Faculty Award, Michigan State University’s highest faculty honor.