Trammell Crow by Willam Bragg Ewald Jr

Author:Willam Bragg Ewald, Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Urban Land Institute
Published: 2005-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

There were, however, undercurrents.

Inevitably, as a price to pay for ambition, Crow had limited time with his children, particularly in the early years. “Oh, the goddamned Indian Guides!” he once burst out at seven o’clock one evening as he and Bob Glaze still were hard at work, realizing he had forgotten the meeting. He had done what his driving ambition made him do. He’d kept to his cruel schedule of travel and resisted cutting back. Much of the children’s upbringing fell to a beloved nanny who remained at the Crow home for decades.

And if one looked, one could detect traces of undercurrents in Trammell Crow himself. He worried, for example, about the effect of money on children. In 1968, he drove with A.J. Land from Prague to Nuremberg and struggled with this question. If you give a lot of money to children, do you deprive them of the chance to succeed on their own? Or is it wrong to withhold the money from them?

With all his openness, he could be calculating—folksy and foxy at the same time. “Trammell’s a mystery man,” Grady Jordan once observed. “By the time you figure him out, he’s moved on. One day he’ll tell you a town has too many buildings. A month later he’ll be putting up a new one. He thinks you should mystify people a bit.”

At times, he could swallow his antipathy and work on a deal with somebody he considered “trouble.” But he could be unforgiving toward people who had wronged him. When someone did something he considered inexcusable, he never forgot, never forgave, and carried a grudge. He had an indelible list of enemies.

Though his business took him at great speed all over the world, he had begun with a phobia of flying. Eddie Kahn recalls how Crow would head the line of passengers in order to get the seat by the emergency exit; how when a plane malfunctioned on a trip to South Bend, he came back to Dallas by the New York Central. With Ewell Pope in New Zealand, when a jerry-built plywood plane struck a tree with its wing and had to be chopped out, Crow was beside himself quivering, “I’m not cold, I’m scared.” This fear, he eventually overcame. “Bill,” he once said to pilot Bill Cooper, “there’s only one pilot on this plane. I should know how to land it if I had to.” And he did learn, probing into details with his usual thoroughness.

More than once, exhaustion had driven Crow to black out. In John Stemmons’s office they had to revive him with a shot of whiskey and cold towels around his head. Among other subjects, he became interested in psychiatry.

With his simple surface and inner crosscurrents, Crow remained a mystery even to those who thought they knew him best.

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