Nature Lover, Montgomery County Worker Harry Crow III

Harry L. Crow III, 65, a retired Montgomery County parking meter technician with a lifelong love of the outdoors, died May 1 at Shady Grove Adventist Hospital after surgery for esophageal cancer.

Although he was a county employee for many years, Mr. Crow had other enthusiasms that captured his time and attention. Nature was one of them. A board member and former president of the Rockville chapter of the Isaak Walton League, one of the nation's oldest environmental organizations, he was passionate about conservation and environmental protection.

In the late 1980s, he bought a burned-out shack on 122 acres in West Virginia and with help from his wife and Isaak Walton friends proceeded to transform the property over the years into what he considered paradise on earth. He photographed the changing seasons, built a large pond and stocked it with fish and loved the wildlife that found refuge there, including bluebirds, hummingbirds and a flock of wild turkeys.

He was a collector, with a special interest in D.C. and Montgomery County history. His objects of interest included transportation tokens, city directories, books about the county and the District -- anything that transported him into the local and regional past. As his sister noted, he was an amateur in the literal sense of the word -- for love, not for profit.

Whenever something captured his interest, she said, he wanted to find out everything possible about it. That included a relatively obscure Tennessee writer named Will Allen Dromgoole, a woman distantly related to his mother. He collected her books, traveled to Tennessee to research her life and visited the bridge that was the subject of her best-known poem, "The Bridge Builder."

His father was an opera singer, choir director and composer, and although Mr. Crow may have flunked violin and piano as a youngster, his love of music matched his father's. His genre was bluegrass. The group Seldom Scene was his favorite.

Mr. Crow was born in the District and graduated from Montgomery Blair High School in 1959. He served in the U.S. Navy aboard the USS Independence and the USS Forrestal.

After his discharge he worked in the computer industry and was regularly offered promotions but couldn't stand being cooped up in an office. In 1979, he joined the Montgomery County Department of Transportation as a parking meter shop technician and was a union representative. He retired this year.

Mr. Crow was a member of Oakdale Emory United Methodist Church in Olney and was grateful for the care he received during his illness from the congregation's Stephen Ministry.

Survivors include his wife of 28 years, Leslie Gail Crow of Rockville; a son, Shawn Hamilton Crow of Sykesville; two sisters, Kathleen Graham and Margaret Gardner, both of Silver Spring; and two grandchildren.