Remembering Tom Crawford

I met Tom Crawford on the third-floor landing of the Hull Street Parking Deck early one morning late last August. We had arrived almost simultaneously for our scheduled interview, and Tom had paused at the landing to knot his burgundy, patterned necktie. We walked together up the slope to Russell Special Collections Libraries building where we spent the remainder of the morning and early afternoon discussing history, politics, and the business of covering politics.

Tom Crawford, Dean of the State Capitol Press Corps, died Wednesday morning after waging a decades-long battle against cancer. A quick wit and, according to all accounts, an even quicker typist, Tom’s journalism career actually began here in Athens. A 1968 graduate of Clarkston High School, he had opted for UGA over Georgia Tech and majored in journalism. He worked at the student-led Red & Black, rising to rank of sports editor. Tom graduated with honors in 1972 and began his professional career as a beat reporter at the Alabama state capitol for the Montgomery Advertiser.

From 1972 to 1983, Tom worked at the Advertiser, Atlanta Constitution, Marietta Daily Journal, and Atlanta Journal reporting on local, county, and state politics. He became a fixture on the campaign trail and under the Georgia Gold Dome during those hurly-burly legislative sessions of the 1970s and early 1980s. Although it surely did not seem so at the time, Tom was witnessing what one of his colleagues, the late David Nordan, dubbed the end of “southern gothic” politics in the state. Indeed, Tom chronicled the relatively swift, if excruciatingly overdue, modernization of Georgia’s political system.

Tom stepped away from reporting in 1983 and assumed an accounts executive position at Pringle Dixon Pringle, a full-service public relations agency in Atlanta. From writing company newsletters and corporate speeches to coordinating press conferences and media interviews, the job proved a perfect fit for someone with Tom’s skill set.

He also dabbled in speechwriting during the 1980s and 1990s. One supposes that after hearing and reporting on enough speeches delivered by others on the stump and from the House and Senate wells that Tom figured he would try his hand at crafting his own for public consumption.

Already a print media veteran, Crawford blazed a trail for online journalists and bloggers in the state when he launched Capitol Impact­—now known as Georgia Report—in 2000. Like countless others, I first encountered Tom through his weekly columns that appeared in more than 35 newspapers across the state. Another equally important aspect of the Georgia Report was its subscription service targeted at the lawyers, lobbyists, and myriad other political insiders who relied on Tom’s timely reporting and insightful analysis.

Indeed, those same qualities convinced me to send Tom an email last August requesting an interview with him for the Russell Library’s Two-Party Georgia Oral History Project. The reply I received was Tom Crawford distilled, and it is worth quoting in full.