Biographies: Guy C. Crawford, 1977, Winn Parish, LA.
Submitted by Greggory E. Davies, 120 Ted Price Lane, Winnfield, LA 71483
**********************************************
Copyright.  All rights reserved.
http://usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm
http://usgwarchives.net/la/lafiles.htm
**********************************************


 


From: January 5, 1977 Winn Parish Enterprise News-American

Neighbors

by Tony Shelton

His birthday cake caught fire before his two grandsons could get the 90
candles lit.

That was four years ago.  On February 4, Guy Crandall Crawford, 601 Center,
will be 94 years old.  No word yet on the candle situation.

Crawford said he got to be 94 by exercising, eating lots of good food,
and not taking medicine.

"I figured I didn't need it.  If I had an illness, I just toughed it out.
 My brother-in-law, John Emerson, said if everybody was like me he'd
be out of business."

Crawford's two brothers-in-law John and Joe Emerson were druggists in
Winnfield.

Crawford shies away from hospitals as well as medicines.  He has been
hospitalized only once, in 1940.

"Another car forced mine off the road, it rolled down an embankment and
crushed my leg," Crawford said.

Crawford grew up in Crandall, Texas, a town settled by his grandfather near
Fort Worth.

He took business courses, and worked as a bookkeeper in his father's
mercantile business.  The Crawfords were also in the telephone business.

"We put in the first lines between Crandall and Dallas, along about 1900."

Later he became a wholesale grocery salesman for Hormel and Decker of Dallas,
among others.

"I'd travel by train as much as I could and then rent a horse and buggy,"
Crawford said.

In 1918, he got his first crank-it-yourself Model T.

"There were no paved roads then, just gravel.  I think the better roads now
are one of the biggest changes from that time to this."

In 1928, he married Naomi Emerson, a schoolteacher who he had met through
relatives in Fort Worth.

Along came the Depression and a decrease in grocery business.

"There was a lot of groceries people just wouldn't buy.  The first thing they
cut down on was meat.  People ate what they raised in the garden."

Even before the Depression retail prices had been low; 25 cents a pound for
bacon; 15 cents for a quart of milk; 20 cents a pound for coffee.

"And the hardest thing about the Depression was making the collections,"
Crawford said.

Even so, he stayed with it, retiring in 1951.

But the family moved to Winnfield in 1936.

"A married woman couldn't get a job teaching in Texas," Mrs. Crawford said. 
"So I thought I'd come back home."

She was from Bienville Parish, but her brothers, John and Joe ran a drugstore
in Winnfield.  For four years, Mrs. Crawford taught in elementary school, and
22 years more in home economics.  She retired in 1962.

The Crawfords have one son, Morris, of Winnfield, and two grandchildren,
Stephen, 21, and Mike, 15.

"He's a very determined person," Mrs. Crawford said of her husband.  "The
summer before he was 90, he painted the house as far up as the ladder would
take him.  I wouldn't let him get up on the 16-foot ladder.  We hired somebody
to do the rest."

Crawford still rakes the leaves in his yard.  Many people who don't know him
personally are familiar with the straight figure in the white shirt, black
suit, tie, and hat.

"Dr. Mosley said: Don't get in that old rocking chair or you're gone,"
Crawford said.

He hasn't and he's not.