Jerry Crowley

In the records at the Administration Building is a notation that one Jeremiah F. Crowley, nationality Irish, entered the service of the college in April, 1905. There was not much else to help form a conception of the real Jerry Crowley, janitor and bell ringer of Dartmouth Hall, who has lately passed away. One can infer, however, from the records that he gave almost twenty-five years of his life in loyal service to the college. The rest that follows is but a brief and inadequate conception of him by one who had an office for the last few years in Dartmouth Hall and saw him almost every day.

There was something elflike in his character and from his honest and merry eyes there shone forth a beam which I am sure James Stephens would have recognized—something particularly and generically Irish. Something reflecting the lush green fields of Ireland, the lakes, and the tales and folklore of Oisin. The toil of years, and toward the end bodily pain, could not suppress his essentially happy nature. He was quick to detect pompousness or humanity as the case might be in someone who had tickled his fancy. A piquant observation and then a peal of roguish laughter. Jerry Crowley, a devout Roman Catholic, was also a Peter Pantheist.

The peace of green fields, babbling brooks, of the sound of the Angelus is now his, the peace of Ireland which existed only in the dreams of sweet old men like Jerry, who died far from his natal home. In pace requiescat. Jerry, who rang classes in and out for many generations of Dartmouth men has gone, and I, for one, shall miss him.