My Mentor and Friend: Harry Crosby

Memories of the Intrepid Baja California Writer, Photographer, Explorer.

I learned today that my friend Harry W. Crosby died yesterday. I wasn’t surprised, because he was 98, and had been battling dementia for years. Nor am I exactly sad, because those of us who knew him got more years with him than we easily could have—Harry was an intrepid traveler, prone to heading far off the beaten track in places like the remote mountain villages of Baja California, where the residents he visited live far from medical aid. Harry rode miles on mule back through Baja’s Sierra Giganta mountains, enroute to documenting one of his major inspirations—the cave paintings whose colorful images would dance through his work for years to come. He visited those mountains every few years for the rest of his life, and he later beat cancer through a year of arduous treatments, and then had a serious back surgery to regain mobility when an injury left him confined to bed. He always came back.

Russel and I met Harry in 1998, when we were doing the Sea of Cortez Review, a collection of stories, essays, and poems about Baja, which I edited and Russel beautifully illustrated. Chuck Valverde of Wahrenbrocks, a long-ago San Diego landmark bookstore, mentioned we should meet Harry Crosby, then sent us to Dennis Wills of DG Wills Books in La Jolla. Dennis also said we needed to meet Harry and sold me a copy of his latest work The Cave Paintings of Baja California, which had just been published by (and is still available from) Sunbelt Publications of San Diego. The book hooked me on page one—in spite of the stunning artwork in this coffee-table beauty, the book is an adventure tale. I resolved to meet its author.

When I dialed Harry’s number, his gruff manner nearly made me hang up, but I managed to gather up the nerve and tell him about our project. He invited us to vsit him in La Jolla. Just seeing his home was worth the visit—the place was a work of art in itself, an oasis of plants and artwork created and curated by Harry and his wife, the artist Joanne Crosby. We met them both, chatted awhile, and I fell in love. They were old school but not old, with great enthusiasm for life. When Joanne excused herself Harry put us on the spot, asking what exactly we wanted from him. We showed him the previous two reviews and told him we planned to have interviews in the next issue and wanted to interview and photograph him. He growled an assent and added that it was the least he could do to assist us in what he called, “your Quixotic adventure.”

We did the interview and Russel did a fine sketch of Harry that ran with the piece in the final issue of the Sea of Cortez Review, which came out in 2000 and was sold for years after that, thanks to our new publishing and distribution deal with Sunbelt Publications. Soon, I was working at Sunbelt, and not long after, I was working with Harry on his follow up to Antigua California, another story of exploration and destiny, Gateway to Alta California, which Russel did the cover for. We were one big happy Baja-loving family and that partnership extended throughout my decade-long tenure that ended with me as Sunbelt’s Editor-in-Chief. (For those readers who don’t know, I left to become a freelance editor in 2012, but I still work with Sunbelt.)

In those years, Harry and I worked on three book projects, including Gateway, his novel Portrait of Paloma, and a reprint of The Cave Paintings of Baja California. Each project was an excuse to spend hours on the phone with him, or to drop by books or artwork to Casa Crosby, where Joanne would serve me exotic teas and Harry would scowl and nit-pick a paragraph or a catalogue ad to pieces. But perhaps our greatest exchanges came in the faxes we exchanged day after day. My corrected page proofs would be faxed to him, and always came back with erudite, witty comments written beautifully in his calligraphic handwriting in the margin. One mentioned my “admirable persistence in the search for a more felicitous phraseology.” What editor could resist such praise?

Sometimes we exchanged a dozen faxes in one morning, each changing or rearranging only one word in a sentence, until we both agreed it was as good as we could make it. So few successful authors—he’d already had five acclaimed books come out before I met him—would not only tolerate this sort of interference, but warmly welcome it.

One day, I was shown the famous fax that Harry had sent to Sunbelt in 1997, the night that he found a page was missing in the initial printing of Cave Paintings. Harry had received a box of books from the shipment the Chinese printer had forwarded for a special event, and had discovered the dreadful error upon opening each of the copies in the box. He faxed a message relating the problem late that night, adding that he would keep believing, until he heard different, that the only flawed books were the 25 in his possession, but he noted at the bottom of the page, “I should add that I also believe in campaign finance reform and the brotherhood of man.”

How I loved Harry’s wit—and his vocabulary. One day when he’d sent me a change that needed to be made in the painting that would be on the cover of Gateway, I told him I had relayed the message to Russel. Harry replied dryly, “Did he bristle?” Russel and I are still laughing about that comment, as you can imagine. Harry threw off a few people with his gruff manner, but Russel and I saw through it. Harry loved Russel—he loved anyone who was truly talented—and always lit up when we visited together.

My last visit with Harry and Joanne came in 2019. I’d heard his memory was fading, and in fact, he didn’t seem to know who I was at first, but when I mentioned his ongoing book research he perked right up. Over the years, I’d seen him give many slideshows and presentations about his research, at prestigious places like the Bancroft Library; he could easily talk for an hour with no notes, naming dozens of men on the Portola expedition of 1769, describing the geography of that overland trek—complete with place names, numbers of horses and mules, flora and fauna, and even quotes from the diaries. Once he started talking that afternoon on the patio with Joanne and I, that Harry was back.

Harry Crosby’s legacy will live on, as long as people are curious about the ancient cave paintings of Baja California, and the earliest recorded history of the peninsula and its people—did I mention his photographs are excellent? His black and white portraits of the Californios, the families who live in the mountains he traveled, are also stunning. And there’s a wonderful hour-long documentary about him that aired on PBS, made by the talented Isaac Artenstein. Check it out here.

Ride on, Harry. RIP.

hasta pronto!