Editor's note: This article contains language some may find offensive.
This is the story I never could have imagined I would have to write.
And a story I will wish for the rest of my days that I never had occasion to do.
This is the obituary of my friend of more than 30 years, the perpetual motion machine known as Patrick Crowley — “Duke,” to his Irish-to-the-bone family.
But here we are, Crowley.
Patrick Crowley died unexpectedly Saturday morning at his Ft. Thomas home. At the all-too-young age of 63.
He leaves behind the ones he loved the most — his wife Pam, daughter Shayna, son Conor, and three grandchildren.
He was a legendary journalist — a nose-to-the-wheel beat reporter who covered Kentucky politics like the morning dew for decades.
And once he had conquered the Commonwealth, he turned to building a second, very successful career, with his beloved baby, Strategic Partners LLC, a public relations/public affairs firm which damned near cornered the regional market.
My boy Crowley never did anything half-assed. All or nothing with this guy.
Kakie Urch — now an associate professor of multimedia journalism at the University of Kentucky — was Crowley’s editor at the Kentucky Enquirer from 1998 to 2003.
“Patrick was the absolute energy of the room, even in a very energetic room,’’ Urch said.
She remembered how Crowley threw himself into his work the morning of 9/11, working the phones and gathering reaction from Kentucky political figures, as the images of terrorism were unfolding on the newsroom’s TV.
He managed to get Kentucky’s then-U.S. Senator, the late Jim Bunning, on the phone as the senator was being evacuated from the Capitol through a window, because no one knew if the Capitol would be the next target of the terrorists.
“It was really gripping stuff,’’ Urch said. "Only Patrick could have pulled that off."
It was par for the course for Crowley.
“He’d come in early in the morning, after already having coffee with about 16 different people and he would immediately jump on the phone calling sources,” she said. “And, of course, he could always make us laugh.”
That he could. One of the funniest men I have ever met. I was the Ohio politics reporter for the Enquirer while Patrick worked the other side of the river. All we ever did when together was laugh, often at the family bar in Mount Adams — Crowley’s Highland House, founded in 1937 by his great-grandfather, William “Specs” Crowley.
Since the death of his uncle, former Cincinnati Council member David Crowley, Patrick and a passel of Crowley cousins have owned the Irish bar where the stout still flows freely.
Funeral arrangements for Patrick are still pending. But I would be shocked if there were not one of hell of a wake at Crowley’s in Mount Adams.
We covered four presidential nominating conventions together — 1996, with the Republicans meeting in San Diego and the Democrats in Chicago; and 2000, in Los Angeles with the Democrats and Philadelphia with the Republicans.
Here’s how scrupulously honest Patrick Crowley was:
At the conventions on the West Coast, I would tape a conversation with Maryanne Zeleznik — now my boss at WVXU, but in those days, she was news director at WNKU. She asked me to record a segment at 4 a.m. Cincinnati time on the prior day’s convention news.
Being the boy who can’t say no, I would be in my hotel room at 1 a.m. Pacific Time to take Maryanne’s call — dog-tired as I was from working since 6 a.m.
Once in San Diego — Crowley’s first convention — I recorded with Maryanne and settled in to catch about four hours of sleep before I had to crank it up again.
About 3 a.m., the phone rings. I pick it up. Crowley is on the other end.
I can’t sleep, he says. I charged a movie to my hotel room. Do you think the Enquirer will get mad? Should I reimburse them?
I answered with a string of obscenities that turned the air in my room blue.
Nobody at the Enquirer gives a rat’s ass if you watch a movie in your room. Neither do I. Never call me again.
I went back to sleep, thinking about this guy sitting up all night worrying about whether it was ethical for him to make the Enquirer pay for his movie.
God bless him.
His generosity had no bounds. To his friends and to those he didn’t know.
On Saturday, right after word had spread about Patrick’s passing, Cincinnati Council member Mark Jeffreys posted a wonderful photo of himself with Crowley at the 37th annual Christmas dinner for the needy and the lonely at the Northern Kentucky Convention Center.
They were both volunteering for the event — and for Crowley, it was the 15th Christmas in a row where he had worked at the dinner.
“A gentle and giving soul,” Jeffreys wrote. “A generous and loving human being.”
Rick Green, former Enquirer publisher and editor, now the executive editor of the Lexington Herald-Leader, was one of the last of our Enquirer circle to talk with Pat.
Green called him a few weeks ago to talk about a Kentucky story the Herald-Leader is working on; Crowley, of course, had some good political sources to pass on and some useful advice.
And Crowley invited him to come to Cincinnati for steak dinner at Jeff Ruby’s.
“I am so sorry for not making the time, Patrick," Green said. “Heaven gained one talented, loving, authentic and genuinely caring angel on Saturday.”
And, Green said, a new arrival in heaven whose first question for St. Peter would be, “where’s the bar around here?”
I found out about my old friend’s death Saturday afternoon. I had just left a matinee at Mariemont Theatre and turned my phone on. The first thing I saw was a text message from Sherri Crowley, his uncle David’s widow.
I was gobsmacked, stunned, overwhelmed.
For half an hour, I sat in the car, running over the news in my head, and thinking about the prospect of a world without Patrick Crowley in it. I couldn’t move.
It was heartbreaking.
At Patrick’s request, I had done more than my share of Crowley obituaries for the Enquirer — his mother, his father, his uncle David.
And now this one.
That’s it, Patrick. I’m done. No more.
See you some day on the other side, brother.
