Richard Crowe was born and raised in Dos Palos, California, about 100 miles north of Tulare.  His mother was Tulare-raised Saralee Zumwalt, daughter of medical doctors. Elmo and Frances, and older sister to three brothers: Elmo (of U.S. Navy fame), Bruce Craig who died young in 1933, and Jim.  Richard’s father, Dick Crowe, owned and managed the Dos Palos Telephone Company. Upon graduating from high school, Richard attended and graduated from the University of California, Davis, served four years in the U.S. Navy (1967-1971), including service in Vietnam, and then made a career with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for 33 years.  He retired from BLM in 2006 and lives with his wife, Beverly, in Beaumont, California, located in the hills west of Palm Springs.

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Richard became interested in family history and began writing memoirs and collecting family history materials in the late 1990s.  After 30 years he’s collected an enormous array of stories, memoirs, and photos from both his mother’s and father’s families. Richard feels blessed that so many relatives wrote and saved so much interesting history. A hometown friend urged Richard to publish his memoirs but he expanded on the idea to include his family history.  His idea was to high-grade the best of what he has into books, particularly for his children and grandchildren, rather than leave them with hundreds of computer files which they otherwise might not ever get to.  He was advised that putting his family history into a single book would cause the book to fall apart so his writing is divided into three books: Volume I, available now through Amazon, is on his mother’s side, Volume II will be on his father’s side, and Volume III will be his own memoirs.