COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES:A bit too sappy for John

It happens a lot. When someone I know passes away, a friend will inevitably say, “You should write about them.” I usually decline, as gently as possible, since this space is supposed to be funny, which it is, sort of, about every other week.

As topics go, someone dying is less than ideal, but John Crean’s passing is an exception. A big one.

John Crean was known as a very successful entrepreneur and an extraordinary philanthropist who, along with his wife of 58 years, Donna, did more to make the world a better place than anyone in the entire history of making the world a better place, which goes back to, I don’t know, way before power steering. Since his death Thursday, you’ve been reading about the staggering list of schools, charities, churches, libraries, hospitals and who-knows-what-all that either would not be what they are today or not exist at all were it not for the Creans.

An incredible legacy to be sure, but to me, that’s not what made John Crean John Crean.

To me, John goes in that very skinny folder of people who would have stood apart from the rest of us even without the wealth or the power or the celebrity they achieved. What makes them special is who they are, not what they’ve done.

One of the very few people in my version of that folder was Col. Bill Barber. In the dictionary of life, you could find Bill ‘s picture beside two definitions — “United States Marine” and “Southern gentleman.”

Bill, who lived in Irvine and passed away in 2002, was a Congressional Medal of Honor recipient from the Korean War. The story of how he earned that honor on a bitter-cold December night at the Chosin reservoir — “Frozen Chosin” — would make the hair on the back of your neck stand up and is wilder than anything that Hollywood has ever dished up.

But it’s a story you would never hear from Bill Barber. Like most combat veterans, Bill would rather talk about anything, anything at all, rather than himself or what he had done. But the fame and the medals didn’t matter.

If Bill Barber had spent his entire life working as a grocer in the small Kentucky town where he was born, he would still be respected and admired by everyone he met. It’s what the military calls “command presence,” and you either have it or you don’t. When people who have it step into a room, everyone else is drawn to them and follows their lead.

Bill Barber and John Crean had command presence, and lots of it.

For someone who was very, umm, comfortable financially, John could not have been more like the guy next door if he had been the guy next door. If the first person who said, “What you see is what you get” wasn’t referring to John Crean, he should have been. The same applies to another old saw, “He didn’t suffer fools lightly.”

We got along great, but when I was in the mayor business, John would not hesitate to call and tell me what he thought about the latest stroke of genius from me or anyone else at Costa Mesa City Hall. He would say that something we did at last night’s meeting seemed really dumb. I’d try my best to explain it, then he’d say, “Oh, OK, that’s what I thought. It is dumb.”

What I will remember most about John, though, is that he was a very funny guy, in an irreverent way and with a style that often comes with being successful in the extreme. John was not trying to impress anyone nor likely to be impressed by anyone.

One day, we went to lunch at a hamburger joint on Bristol. A hamburger joint is where a lunch with John usually occurred, ideally In-N-Out. We were in one of John’s Mercedes-Benz muscle cars (he liked those), and when he stepped out, I couldn’t help but notice that the entire toe portion of his right shoe was missing.

I tried not to say anything, but apparently I was staring.

“Oh,” he said. “Foot’s killing me. Couldn’t find anything comfortable.”

He also had some of those quirky habits that only those who are beyond worrying about money can afford. John had a hard time keeping track of his car keys, so when he got a Lincoln Town Car with a combination keypad on the door, that was a breakthrough. But he could never remember the combination, so he painted it below the keypad with nail polish. When someone asked him if he wasn’t worried that the car would disappear, they retracted the question as soon as they remembered to whom they were speaking.

John also had what had to be one of the gaudiest watches ever made, which he would wear just for fun. It was a gold-nugget, diamond-encrusted beast that cost more than the average neurosurgeon makes in two years and would have taken an anaconda about 72 hours to get down. When my wife asked John if he was nervous wearing the thing in public, he said, “Are you kidding? Who would believe this is real?”

Godspeed, John Crean. They didn’t just break the mold when they made you. They shattered it into a million pieces.

But I will tell you this. It’s a good thing John isn’t around to hear all this sappy stuff. He wouldn’t put up with it.

I gotta go.