By Gary Crocker
In the spring of 1985, I invited my father’s novelty trio to perform at an ice cream social for the junior high at Westminster Christian Schools where I taught. They called their group at the time “The Three Mistakes”. It consisted of my Dad, Mel Crocker, his brother Glenn, and friend Bob Barnhart. Following the performance, I interviewed him about his path to Christ.
Mel Crocker is interviewed by son Gary, telling of his resistance to faith despite multiple brushes with death in and after WWII.
Gary: I’ve asked my Dad to stay after to share a little bit with you, because I think he has something he can share that might affect you as you are growing up.
Mel: They’re pretty well grown up now as it appears to me.
Gary: Yeah. Right.
Dad, could you share with them how you felt about Christianity during the period of time that I was their age?
Mel: [pauses] I can, but I’m not very proud of how I felt about it. Gary gave his heart to the Lord when he was about nine years old, and during that period of time, and before, really, I was too busy to come to the Lord, to confess the Lord. Too many things to do. I felt that it was for someone else, not me. In fact Gary, when he was about eleven, he came to me and asked me to see if I would consider becoming a Christian. I told him I didn’t want it.
Gary: What was it that changed that attitude?
Mel: Well there were a number of things that changed it, but it all came pretty much to a head when in January 1966 I had a heart attack. While I was recovering from it, my sister, [Louise Cornwall] who is visiting here from Phoenix right now, convinced me that I should come to her apartment for my recovery period, which was to be rather long. By this time, things were starting to stir inside of me. I saw, being the Christian woman that she was (and still is) and I thought that perhaps there was something that maybe I had been missing. So I went to her apartment and during the several months that I lived with her, she read to me, and I started reading and suddenly many of those things that I thought were so important to me were no longer important to me. And her niece, who incidentally, is a very good friend of your principal [Esther Dieffenwierth], Judy Cornwall, was going to Southern California College [now Vanguard University] at the time. She came over and sat on the corner of my bed and would read to me and pray for me. Things started turning around. I started to see where my life had been pretty much a dismal failure, a very lonely life even though I had beautiful children, I was still very lonely. Things started to change for me.
Gary: During that period of time, in fact two days after your heart attack, I went into the Air Force and had to hear about a lot of this second hand – not second hand, but long distance. I have a letter here that I got from Dad when I was in training. You can see that it’s pretty battered. I kept it in my wallet for the remainder of the time I was in the service. Do you want to read that section, or do you want me to read it?
Mel: You read it.
Gary: This is talking about that period of time that he was just talking about. He said,
I’ve finished reading Luke in the Bible and very interested in reading the rest of the way. I’m desperately groping son, and Reverend Sells, through his very frequent and welcomed visits has helped me a great deal; also Sis and Tom, through their sincere faith have been a great help to me. But of all, it goes without saying that your faith and your dogged determination has made my pride in you blossom into the feeling that soon, I too will join you as a Christian. I ask you to pray that I can soon overcome whatever power it is that is restraining me and keeping me from asking His guidance and blessing.
Gary: I had a hard time with that. I got a little emotional with it. But that heart attack wasn’t the first time that you had a brush with death. There were a couple of other times that I’ve heard about many times.
Mel: I think the Lord was dealing with me for most of my adult life. But I was running helter-skelter, and I wasn’t listening, and I always turned Him away. But during the War, World War II, I was in the South Pacific. But prior to going to the South Pacific, I was in training at the university of Idaho for radio and radar airborne flight communications. A couple weeks before I was to graduate with a class of about 125 sailors, all of them in communications, I got the flu, a 3-day bug. Because I couldn’t take the exams with the rest of the students, I was held back two weeks. My friends went on to Memphis, Tennessee. Two week later, I followed them, and we went on to further and more extensive training at Memphis. They went from there to Florida and I went to San Diego. Later they caught up with me in San Diego. In the meantime they had been assigned to a carrier based aircraft – fighter bombers. I was assigned to the big boats, PBY patrol aircraft. We had a going away party – we didn’t know exactly what day or what hour they were leaving, but we knew they were leaving soon for the South Pacific. Three weeks later I got a newspaper and their ship had caught a torpedo aimed at the battleship Mississippi and they were destroyed. Every one of them was killed.
[Note: This was the USS Liscome Bay, which sank in the Gilbert Islands on its first and last mission November 24, 1943.]
Mel: [continues]: He was dealing with me then, but I still didn’t respond. The tug wasn’t strong enough. Later, when in the South Pacific and flying patrols I was out on a long night patrol and became violently ill with malaria and they had to bring the plane back and bring me back in. I was grounded for quite some time during recovery process I was going through, my plane and my crew went out on another night patrol and got into a storm and crashed into the side of a mountain and everyone was killed. But I still wasn’t getting the message.
But the Lord wasn’t quite through with me. After I came back and after we moved down here I stepped out of a telephone booth at an intersection in Long Beach seconds before an out of control automobile totally demolished that phone booth. I mean, I wasn’t six to eight feet away from that phone booth.
So, yes, I’ve had several brushes, and finally God LET me have a dandy of a heart attack. [smiling] And that was when I finally got the message that it was time to start thinking about what He was trying to say to me and what does that mean?
If I might just say one or two comments. Gary did all he could, and my sister before my heart attack, did all she could to make it possible for me to find my way to the Lord. But I rejected Him, I rejected until finally it happened. The main point that I’m talking to you right now is that if among you there is a parent or a relative or close friend who is rejecting the Lord; you may be heart-sick that they won’t come to [tape ends here].
Gary, 2022: The VHS tape ran out at this point, so I’ll try to recall what he said, at least for that first point, and give a couple of thoughts of my own 37 years later.
As I recall, his first point was to never stop praying for your loved ones no matter how resistant they seem. He might also have mentioned the importance of living out your faith in the practical daily situations we find ourselves in so that those around us who might be resisting Christ can see that He is real.
A point I would like to add is that God used many of His people to get the message through to him. He used their lives and their prayers.
Post script
At the time of this interview Dad was nearing completion of a book about the PBY aircraft and its crews during World War II. It was published in 1987 as Black Cats and Dumbos; World War II’s Fighting PBYs. It was well received, and a second printing was released before it went out of print shortly before he passed in 1989. Many of the crew members whose stories were told in the book were disappointed that it was no longer available, and it became my ambition to get it back in print. We did that in 2002 as print-on-demand. It’s still available through Amazon and sells about 100 copies a year.
If you would like to read the eulogy I gave for him at his memorial service in 1989 you can find it at http://www.crockermediaexpressions.com/family/beliefs/eulogdad.htm