Theron Clark Crawford

Born: 1849.

Died:  1925.

Author of many books including The Amateur Archangel, Crowley apparently met him while he was in New Haven Connecticut.

Theron Clark Crawford, newspaper correspondent and traveler, was a native of Michigan, born at Milford, Oakland county, 29 November 1849, son of the principal of a private school in that village. Under him and others he received a good education, including French and German, and studied Spanish alone. At seventeen he was a district school teacher and the next year head of the Pontiac (Pontiac, Michigan) High School, studying by night to keep up with his classes. In 1869 he became reporter for the Milwaukee Daily News at $12 a week, doing all the local work for the paper for a year, when he be came the Milwaukee correspondent of the Chicago Times.

After the great Chicago fire he went to St. Louis and was engaged as city editor of the Evening Journal, and was presently offered the situation of leading descriptive writer of the Globe-Democrat. He accepted instead, however, the Washington correspondence of the Journal and went to that city in the winter of 1872-73, where he also served the Pittsburg Leader and the New York Herald Bureau. The next interval of Congressional sessions was spent in the home service of the Leader and on his return to the capitol he was first assistant, then chief correspondent of the Chicago Times, at $75 a week. After six years with the Times he took the Washington bureau of the New York World, at $100 and expenses, with privilege of personal signature to his correspondence. Three years more and he transferred to London in charge of the World's foreign correspondence, to organize which he visited all the principal European capitals. In Washington he had studied art at the Corcoran Gallery and etched on copper plates in the U. S. Treasury. Abroad he continued these studies, and now knows familiarly every great gallery in Europe, who re he has studied for practical ends of illustration.

Returning to the United States in 1888, Mr. Crawford published his first two books, English Life Seen Through Yankee Eyes, and An American Vendetta. The former was translated into French, and brought out by a Parisian publishing house. The same year he was chosen president of a syndicate giving a “Wild West" show during the Paris Exposition, which was moderately successful, though enormously expensive. Following a year with this, he traveled in Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany, Holland, Belgium, France and England, in none of which countries did he need an interpreter. He came home again in 1890, to represent important London financial interests, which have since engaged most of his time. He continued writing, providing specially signed articles for the newspaper syndicates, appearing in leading papers of the country. He made special studies of politics, and personally knew every notable public man in the country. He was also familiarly conversant with European affairs, particularly the details of the Alsace-Lorraine question. Upon his return in 1888 he wrote an interesting series of papers on current American affairs for the London Daily Telegraph.

In 1877 Mr. Crawford was wedded to Inez R., daughter of Colonel Charles H. Joyce, M. C., from Vermont, for eight years. They had two children, Jack Randall, born in Washington, in 1878, and Inez Grace, born in Paris, in June, 1889.