There’s one main reason that Nelson Crowley has lived to 100.
“I just got in there and toughed it out,” he said.
Truer words were never said about the centenarian who on Sept. 7 both celebrated his birthday and led the Poole Harvest Days as its grand marshal.
Crowley, in an interview with the Hendersonian a couple weeks later, relayed tales of his youth, when he was the youngest of 10 children being raised by a single mother. Crowley’s father died when he was four, and even at 100, he still has a faint image of him.
“I got a picture in my mind,” he said. Other than that, “I don’t remember my dad.”
Now, all nine of his siblings have passed and Crowley is the last one left to remember the hard times they went through to survive.
He grew up dirt poor. His mother worked in the fields—hoeing tobacco and the like—like a man, he said. They lived on Shelton Farms in Webster County
In addition to the little money they were able to bring in, Crowley said the family grew its own vegetables.
“You had to raise what you ate back when I was raised up,” he said.
Crowley, too, worked in the fields to help the family after he finished the extent of schooling he’d get—to the third grade.
“I remember when I worked for 25 cents a day,” he said. He also remembers a big raise he got somewhere in that time when he got bumped up to 50 cents a day.
For extra money, he and his brother trapped rabbits and sold them for 25 cents a piece, 35 cents if they were dressed.
“I was raised up about as rough as they come,” Crowley said.
At about 16 or 17, Crowley got his first job out in the world, taking a job with the Civil Service in Morganfield. Later, he got on at Chrysler in Evansville, where one of his sisters was working, and stayed on till the Second World War had ended.
After that, he took over a service station in Sebree and ran that for years until another service station in Poole, Crowley Brothers Garage, came up for sale. Crowley bought the garage and moved to Poole.
Throughout it all, he farmed and began buying tracts of land along the way. Now, at 100, the boy who started with nothing has 550 acres to his name.
His son, Billy Joe, said his father was always good with money—despite a third-grade education.
He might be good with money because he never had any growing up. In fact, Crowley didn’t know there was any such thing as paper money—he’d never seen any—for the first part of his life.
“I didn’t even know they made paper money,” he said.
One time, he and his nephew (who was about the same age as him) were walking to church, and Crowley looked down at the gravel road. There was a little wadded piece of paper. “It was green.”
He and his nephew figured it out, picked up the money and took it to a store. The clerk changed the bill, and each got half. Crowley with his part bought a little sack of candy and kept the rest, bringing it home to his mother, who immediately accused him of stealing the money. It took him a while to convince her he’d found it.
There are plenty of other stories. “I got so much I can tell you that I can’t remember it all,” he said.
He got married in Hopkinsville on Dec. 23, 1944, a wedding that his brother paid for at a cost of $5.
Later, he was nervous to buy his first farm, a 97-acre parcel of land. The man who sold it to him thought Crowley would default on the payments, thus allowing him to take it back.
“I fooled him,” Crowley said. He paid it off in four years.
His wife, Jane, was a “working lady” who was employed at and retired from General Electric in Madisonville. She took care of the household expenses, and he took care of the farm expenses. “It worked out perfect,” he said.
Jane passed in 2010. They’d been married 65 years. The couple have three children, Billy Joe Crowley, Rita Whitledge and Annetta Shelton.
Crowley also played guitar and bass fiddle, and played with some other musicians, such as Les Smithhart and Curly Shelton, on WSON. He also played gigs at different spots around the region with different bands.
“About every place that had dances, that’s where we played,” Crowley said.
“He taught himself to play,” Rita said.
“He taught himself everything he did,” Annetta said.
Like his mechanic work. Once on the way to a hunting trip to Canada, Crowley and seven others rented a motorhome for the drive. It broke down late at night near Bloomington, Ill. By the time they were towed to the shop, it was near 3 a.m. and they were told the mechanic would be in by 7 a.m. It was the water pump that had gone out, and Crowley had it diagnosed and the water pump out by the time the mechanic arrived.
Crowley still has the urge to get out in the fields. Bushogging mostly and his children say on the hottest day of the year.
“He thinks he’s young,” Rita said.
Billy Joe recalled several close calls and injuries, none worse than a tractor-trailer incident in which a cable almost sliced both legs off, leaving him in the hospital for two months and with a recovery that is still ongoing.
Still, Crowley keeps going. He sometimes drives to Evansville, and splits mornings between a breakfast spot in Dixon and the Cairo Country Café, where he’s a crowd favorite and is allowed to park any way he wants. Granddaughter Melissa Shelton, who often accompanies him, acknowledges that he “rolls right up to the porch, real, real close.”
At his birthday party after the Poole Harvest Days, some 200 people came to wish him well. In addition to three children, he has eight grandchildren, 12 great-grandchildren and two great-great grandchildren.
His wisdom: “Be faithful. Do everything right. Don’t take something that’s not yours.”
Of his life, Crowley said, “I’m pleased. The good Lord left me here for a reason.”