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Combining
art, engineering
Alumnus
views art and technology as entertainment
Distinguished
Alumni
a continuing series
Computer technology and electrical engineering are the principal
threads in the career tapestry that James E. Crawford ’68
has been weaving for 56 years. His hand-woven masterpiece
is interspersed with decorative designs of music, art, and
photography.
James E. Crawford ’68, a
managing partner at Frontenac Co., a private investment
firm with more than $1 billion under management, recently
was named Chair of Princeton’s National Annual
Giving
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Mr. Crawford’s interest in electronics began at the
young age of 12 when he read an adventure book that featured
ham radio.
“I got my general license,” he explained. “I
built a transmitter and a receiver and was a ham radio operator
through high school. I was just fascinated with electronics.”
But then something happened that ended his analog love affair:
computers.
“The idea of making a machine do something digital as
opposed to analog was even more enthralling,” Mr. Crawford
said. He pushed the ham radio equipment aside.
“I went to the local IBM office and bought the Principle
of Operations text which was the description of the computer
instructions for their early 1620 computer,” Mr. Crawford
said. “Using masking tape I divided my desk into a grid
and that became the memory for my computer. I put cards with
octal numbers into the grid and I actually ‘programmed’
my desk.”
When he wasn’t teaching himself computer programming,
Mr. Crawford found time to pursue other passions: he played
classical guitar, sang with a folk group, and studied photography.
Mr. Crawford came to Princeton to study computer science.
He entered the Department of Electrical Engineering because
there was no independent department of computer science at
the time.
But he capitalized on the plethora of humanities offerings
at the University, too. As a University Scholar, Mr. Crawford
was exempt from distribution requirements and he augmented
his electrical engineering and graduate-level computer science
courses with Art History, English Literature, Economics, and
Music Theory. Princeton, he said, nurtured both his technological
and his artistic interests.
His interest in photography especially grew dramatically while
he was at Princeton. Mr. Crawford was the primary photographer
for Theater Intime, and one of his two independent photography
studies, a black-and-white photo essay of Central Park, was
exhibited at Gracie Mansion, the residence of the Mayor of
New York City. He even worked as a professional photographer
for a while, but found himself drawn back to computers and
technology.
“From the beginning my real passion was computers and
electronics,” he said. “Computer technology and
electrical engineering have been the common thread of my career.”
After receiving his bachelor of science in electrical engineering
from Princeton and becoming corecipient of the first James
Hayes-Edgar Palmer Prize in Engineering from the School of
Engineering and Applied Science, Mr. Crawford attended Oxford
University on a Rhodes Scholarship. There he attended Balliol
College and studied for a master’s degree in economics.
“Unfortunately, I entered Oxford at the height of the
Vietnam War, and was drafted before I could complete my studies,”
he said. “I only was able to finish the first year of
my program. It’s one of my Walter Mitty dreams to go
back to Oxford and finish. But if I do go back, it will probably
be to study art rather than economics.”
Mr. Crawford served three years in the Navy as a computer
programmer at the Bureau of Naval Personnel in Washington,
D.C.. Mr. Crawford was awarded a Navy Commendation Medal for
a program he developed that enabled multiple ad hoc queries
to be made of the Navy’s master personnel database while
daily updates were processed.
“Previously, it took 23 hours for the daily update,
so that didn’t leave much time for pulling statistics.
The program I developed was invisible to the program running
the update, so multiple queries could be made simultaneously
with the update.
“The Navy used my program for almost 16 years. I received
a letter in 1990 from an officer who had been a junior officer
at the time I was there. He told me that they retired my program
in 1988. I was amazed that they used it for all that time.”
Mr. Crawford said that throughout his professional career
he has been applying technology to real-world situations and
that his Princeton education has been invaluable to his success.
“Never once have I been asked about Maxwell’s
equations, but because I intuitively know how a computer is
programmed, I understand its practical applications,”
he said. “Princeton really does teach you to be a practicing
engineer, but it also prepares you to take that knowledge
and put it into any other career as well.
“I think the practice of engineering is as much art
as it is science,” he continued. “It’s taking
science and putting it into practical life. Engineering teaches
you to be disciplined in your thinking. It’s an invaluable
lesson.”
After a four-year stint as a consultant with McKinsey &
Co., where he served clients ranging from Honeywell and Xerox
to Gibson Guitar Co., Mr. Crawford joined Mark Controls Corp.
in 1978. He spent six years there in a series of engineering,
marketing, and general management positions.
“I was privileged to manage the development and introduction
of the first distributed micro-computer system to monitor
and control large commercial office buildings. We were the
first commercial users of the Motorola 68000 microprocessor
that eventually became the CPU for the Apple Macintosh computer.
So, in a way, we were controlling 60-story office buildings
with a network of Macs,” he explained with a laugh.
In 1984 Mr. Crawford became a partner in the venture capital
partnership of William Blair & Co., and 10 years ago joined
Frontenac Co., a private investment firm with more than $1
billion under management. He is a managing partner of the
firm. He concentrates on investments in telecommunications
and information technology services, sectors in which his
base of technological knowledge is essential.
“For the past 18 years I have helped entrepreneurs realize
their dreams to create companies in the computer technology
and communications industries. It is exhilarating to play
a nurturing role in the most vibrant and turbulent part of
the U.S. economy.”
Alongside his career, Mr. Crawford has created long affiliations
with not-for-profits, working in fundraising and strategic
development. Since the early 1980s he has been active with
the Children’s Home and Aid Society of Illinois (CHASI),
a statewide child and family service agency, of which he has
been chairman of the board and currently oversees CHASI’s
for-profit subsidiary.
Most notably, Mr. Crawford was recently named to a three-year
term as Chair of Princeton’s National Annual Giving
Committee. He started volunteering with Annual Giving shortly
after leaving the Navy.
“Princeton really is a giving place,” he said.
“Student tuition only pays half the cost of a Princeton
education. The other half is borne by alumni either through
Annual Giving or through the endowment.”
As Chair, his role is to lead and motivate the more than 2,500
alumni volunteers who give their time to Annual Giving. He
is more than happy to give back to the University that he
said provided him with a “rich start” in his life
by allowing him to earn a superb engineering education without
sacrificing studies and forays into the humanities.
“Most of my career has been in businesses where I am
working beside liberal arts graduates,” he said. “I
think there is a close parallel to what you are doing in the
sciences and engineering and what you do in art. A well-designed
piece of software is a piece of art. It has engineering discipline
to it, but it has all the subtlety and balance of a good piece
of art. Anyone who has been involved in programming will understand
this.”
“I have been blessed to work in an era when one of the
two biggest scientific trends has been computers, and that
was my training at Princeton,” Mr. Crawford said. “It
has been wonderful.”
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