James H. McCrum ’50

James H. McCrum ’50 died on July 23, 2010. Jim, one of an unknown but seemingly small number of ’50s who never married, led an interesting and atypical life. At Dartmouth he was a member of Phi Delta Theta. Between 1950 and 1956 he spent two years in New York with TWA Airlines and another two years with Adolph Coors in Denver, then moved to Boston with Farrington Manufacturing Co., and among other things field-tested a then-new idea—plastic credit cards—in gas stations. He was then hired by John Wiley & Sons Inc. as a college traveler promoting textbooks and soliciting manuscripts. Several years on the road for Wiley found James “restless again,” and he headed for Australia, where he settled in Sydney in 1962. Feffer & Simons, headquartered in New York, then hired him to promote textbooks in Australia. He retired earlier than planned in 1988 because the company was bought out. By then he had moved north to the Australian Gold Coast, where, in his words at the time of his 50th Dartmouth reunion, “My time these days is taken up by tennis, golf, swimming and beer drinking—a laidback Aussie lifestyle.”