Retiring Union director: Each new day was like the first
Photo: Michael Rothbart
You might expect a more jaded tone to color his words. After all, he’s directed the Wisconsin Union, which now also includes the Union South building, for 33 sometimes tumultuous years. But even though he’s about to retire in a few months, he still carries a passion for the place.
It’s the same passion you could have heard had you been near Crabb’s table on the Union Terrace one evening in the summer of 1950, after his graduation from Janesville High School.
“I was having supper there,” he says. “It was a beautiful summer evening, the sun was setting, and I was awestruck. I thought, “My God, how can it be any better than this?'”
He had his first cup of coffee in the Rathskeller as a freshman in 1950, rejoicing in the choices he faced: Black? Sugar or cream? Both? “I tried them all, at 7 cents a cup,” says Crabb.
He had never been offered coffee at home by his strict grandparents, who had raised him. “My grandmother was a strong Methodist,” he says. “No smoking, no alcohol, no games on Sunday. But she also was very cultured. She took me to concerts from an early age, and I sang in the Janesville Boys Choir for several years.”
His grandfather died when Crabb was 13, and his grandmother vowed that she would live to see him off to college. She did — and died days later while Crabb was attending freshman orientation at Wisconsin.
The freedom Crabb had in choosing his coffee didn’t extend into other areas of student life in the ’50s. “There were lots of rules about everything,” he says. Men and women had to live in separate halls, women had hours, and every social event had to have a chaperone, for example.
The soft-spoken Crabb, who with his black-rimmed glasses could pass for Clark Kent Sr., helped undermine those rules and usher in an era of student empowerment in the otherwise-buttoned-down ’50s. As a student government leader, he helped get first-ever voting rights for students on the Student Life and Interest Committee, previously dominated by faculty.
The summer before his senior year, he worked on the Rathskeller grill from 2 p.m. to midnight, flipping burgers and dripping sweat in those pre-AC times. “I saw another side of the Union,” he says with a smile.
Crabb got off the grill and into the Union leadership as a senior when he became the elected student president. He worked with the man he would later succeed, Porter Butts, who had been named the Union’s director when the building opened in 1928.
“Porter was a visionary with a great ability to conceptualize an idea,” says Crabb. He also knew how to have fun with students. He could do everything from canoeing down a river with them to belting out “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate” while strumming a ukelele.
Just before Crabb graduated in 1954, Butts offered him the job of Union outing adviser at a salary of $3,600. “After my first year on the job,” he recalls, “I found myself helping to oversee a $1 million renovation of the Union kitchen and cafeteria, which coincidentally is what we’re doing again this year.”
In 1958 he also found himself meeting the woman he would marry, the former Barbara Brandriff, then the student chair of the Union Forum committee and now a federal judge in the Western district of Wisconsin. They have two children: Julia Nelson of Madison and Philip Crabb of Golden, Colo.
Rules, which abounded in Crabb’s grandmother’s house and at UW–Madison, popped up again in 1968, his first year as Union director. In response to a lawsuit brought by activist Paul Soglin, a federal judge threw out all the university’s rules for students.
“They had never been published,” says Crabb, “so the court said students couldn’t be expected to know them. After that, we were operating by the seat of our pants at the Union.”
The campus pot was royally roiled at the time he took over the Union leadership. Vietnam protests were plunging the campus into intermittent chaos, but the Union was, in a way, the eye of the hurricane.
“I felt it was very important to have the Union be a safety zone, a cooling-off area and a place for nondestructive debate,” says Crabb.
As havoc was being wreaked all around it, he notes, the Union emerged almost unscathed: “We had only two incidents. A police officer lobbed a tear gas canister into the Union, and a protester broke a cafeteria window — both poor tosses.”
Crabb says he’s been blessed by university administrations that have shown confidence in him and the Union, “so I’ve given students, including the Union Directorate, a lot of latitude. I like to see students get excited, grow and take responsibility.
“If I ever have to say no to students, I strive to have an alternative for them to consider. They’re generally not dead-set on a particular thing. They just want to do something.”
As a low-key director, Crabb “has given people who work for him the room to succeed or fail, just as he does the students,” says Michael Goldberg, Wisconsin Union Theater director. “That is really the only way people can grow.”
Memorial Union has seen several physical changes under Crabb, “but we didn’t lose the character of the building,” he says. “Returning grads still say, “This is how I remember it.'”
One thing that’s missing, however, is obstructed vision in the Rathskeller. Alumni tell Crabb that what they remember is the haze of smoke created by puffing patrons. Now they can see forever, which in this case is across the room.
If you want one marker of students’ feelings toward the Union, consider this: 35-40 percent of each graduating class buys lifetime memberships. “They want to say, “I’m back, I’m home, I’m welcome,'” says Crabb.
And they keep supporting the Union in other ways, because alumni are an engine of improvement. Right now, for instance, graduating classes have committed support for refurbishing the main lounge of Memorial Union (1950), improving the lakeshore at the end of Park Street (1951), funding an electronic display board that lists the day’s events (1974) and buying special lighting for the trees on the Memorial Union Terrace (1975). The Union has also just completed a $1 million fund-raising campaign to provide additional support for programs.
Vexing questions face the Union, however. Crabb worries about the competition from the new arts district in downtown Madison, the isolating attraction of information technology that draws students away from the Union, and the increasing social emphasis on departmental activities vs. the all-campus events formerly held in the Union.
Crabb is confident that the new leadership, both staff and students, will be nimble — and passionate — enough to keep the nearly 75-year-old Union in vibrant health.
As for Crabb, he knows what he’s got to do. “Right now, everything’s up here,” he says as he taps his head. “I want to make sure the Union’s stories and traditions are passed on.” He wants to pass on something important, as his grandmother did when she saw him off to college just days before she died.
And there’s another woman in Crabb’s family who passed on something important: his mother, the former L. Gwendolyne Jacobs of Janesville. She gave him the gift of life, though she died during his birth. She attended UW for a year before earning a degree from Lawrence University in 1925 and then teaching at Janesville High School.
“By all accounts, she was a wonderful person,” says Crabb. “She once astounded a fellow teacher who had nothing to wear to the school prom by lending her a new dress that she hadn’t even worn.”
Would she be proud of what her son has accomplished on the campus where both of them were students? “I like to think so,” says Crabb in a quiet voice.
Water gone and chat over, Crabb gets up from his booth in the Rathskeller to say goodbye to his friend. But he simply can’t resist showing off the place he’s loved since that summer evening on the Terrace in 1950, and he asks, with a mix of pride and excitement in his voice, “Wouldn’t you like to see what we’ve done to the Paul Bunyan Room?”