Allen Cromer, Deceased February 16, 2001 – Needs Content
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IN MEMORIAM—A. HARRISON CROMER
I recall that when I first got back in touch with Harrison Cromer after graduation, in 1970, he was working at the Wadsworth Atheneum and sharing an apartment on Forest Street in Hartford with the artist Bob Gregson. They told me the building was where Mark Twain had lived while he was constructing his famous house that is now the Mark Twain Memorial. (After graduation, Harrison had decided to go by his middle name—because he preferred it—and it was Harrison, not Harry or anything else.)
At that time, he was organizing events for the Atheneum, including concerts and a series of classic and foreign films. (I remember that one film was the Brazilian film Macunaíma, which I assume Harrison’s Latin American Studies degree helped him select and a notable concert was by jazz great vocalist Sheila Jordan, whose appearance he was able to arrange through his connection with Dolly McLean, head of the Hartford Artists Collective). Ultimately, he was promoted to the position of Curator of Film and Dance, which position he was the first to hold.
After the Atheneum, having tired a bit of the museum and Hartford, Harrison moved to New York, where he became the managing director of the now-gone Chelsea Theater, a long-standing “institutional theater,” which I infer to mean nonprofit and which was in periodic financial crisis. Comments from Harrison about the planned production of Hijinks! are quoted in a page C14, November 26, 1980 article in the New York Times , which is as close as I can come to dating his tenure with the Chelsea.
By 1984, Harrison had moved on from the Chelsea Theater to be the executive secretary of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, a 1,200 member guild, until 1987 , and , I did not see Harrison during his time in New York but spoke to him on the phone from time to time. From those conversations, I recall that he also spent some time at the Circle Repertory Company, probably between his stay with the Chelsea and the Society of Stage Directors.
But eventually Harrison tired of New York and returned to Hartford and the Wadsworth. There he met the love of his life, Nathan (regrettably, I no longer remember Nathan’s last name, having met him only once.) I saw Harrison a number of times during that period, but tragically Nathan contracted terminal cancer. Nathan’s death devastated Harrison and he became despondent.
He relocated to Florida and I lost contact with him for a couple of years. I finally found a phone number for him and successfully placed a call to him in Palm Beach, but he was only able to speak with me for a minute. He said there was someone at the door and would call me back, but I never heard from him again. (This must have been in 1988 or 1989.) The next thing I heard about him was that he had passed away. It was a sad and premature end to a creative life.
I am happy to add to the bittersweet saga of Allan Cromer (“Harrison” was new to me, but his mother called him Harry… He was alternately successful and despondent, and usually vague–as Eric recalls. He came to stay with me in San Francisco and I did visit him in NYC. It is unfair in the extreme that the epidemic caught him on the wrong way out the door. He never had a chance, like so many other fine classmates. He would have abhorred any identification with such a fate. But he was a proud and enthusiastic gay man, a very colorful character. He once told me that he had brought a townie back to his room (you might remember the precarious baldacchino and the purple liqueur–the color of Uni-Royal). The guy said to him, “Do all the boys at Yale get rooms like this?” Bless him–he never hurt a living thing.