Remembering Keith Crisco: An intersection of business, politics and public service

by Brad Crone, Campaign Connections and NC SPIN panelist, May 13, 2014.

It was early August 1983 when I first met Keith Crisco. He was an up and coming executive at Stedman Industries in Asheboro. I was D.M. “Lauch” Faircloth’s driver.  Mr. Faircloth was Jim Hunt’s Commerce Secretary  and he was launching his statewide campaign for Governor. Mr. Stedman paraded Mr. Faircloth through his headquarters – meeting and talking with his executive staff including then Legal Counsel Don Vaughan, now a prominent Greensboro attorney and former two-term state senator.

In late September of ’83 I saw Keith Crisco again at a political event in Greensboro and he was talking with Mr. Faircloth about our late August plane crash in Marion. Keith was teasing me that I was the first man to jump out of the plane. Mr. Faircloth, who saved all our lives that dreadful night by getting the two-hinge door to open, chimed in, “Brad’s big butt when through that little hole like one of the great Wallenda’s.”

At 21 years of age, I learned an important lesson about mortality and got to understand that the precious gift of life is never guaranteed.

In January this year Keith stopped by the office to talk about his campaign for U.S. Congress.  After our discussion, Keith was getting ready to leave, he walked up to the side of my desk and look at the picture of the airplane crash from 1983. He had never seen the severity of the crash. He took a minute to take in the details and he looked over his reading glasses and said to me, “You were mighty lucky.”

I told Keith I keep that picture next to my desk to always remind me that every day is a good day.

About a month and a half later Keith and I were meeting again talking politics and lamenting the loss of a mutual friend, Carey Winders, the Sheriff of Wayne County, who died suddenly in his home. Keith knew that I have been  caring for my ailing mother who has been bed-bound in a Raleigh nursing home for nearly two-years.

We talked about if we had a choice in how we got to go we both preferred a sudden death rather than a long drawn out affair – what I call with my mother’s situation – the long walk home.

Then Keith added, “you know the bad thing about a sudden death event is that you don’t get a chance to say goodbye.”

Today, we all want to say goodbye to Keith.

When you look back on his life, you realize what a powerful force he has been for so many people he touched.  He often talked about the value of education.  “I would tell people once I hit the 9^th grade I had more education than my parents,” he would explain.

Keith went on to get a MBA from Harvard and served as a prestigious White House fellow.  He made a mark in business building a successful textile company in an environment where textile companies were leaving the state not staying here and growing.  Under Governor Perdue, he served as Commerce Secretary recruiting 120,000 new jobs to the state in the worst recession since the Great Depression.

He was a loyal Methodist and a dedicated husband, family man, businessman and public servant.

Keith Crisco believed in giving back. I worked with him on the Asheboro liquor-by-the-drink referendum in 2005 then helped him in his re-election campaign. We found ourselves on opposite sides of the fence in 2009 when Governor Perdue was recruiting a major chicken processing facility to Wilson County, which drew concerns from the City of Wilson about the impact of the facility’s waste-water in the city’s watershed.

The communications were invaluable and Keith was always upfront, playing his cards on the table for everyone to see.  That process really taught me to respect his integrity and political acumen.

In his congressional campaign, he ran a good race. He ran for all the right reasons. He worked day and night. He moved 30 points from his initial poll to his final vote tally, so the outcome was bittersweet.  No one likes to lose, but  Keith did it with dignity and respect for the process and the other candidates -- Mr. Aiken and Ms. Morrison.

On Monday, Christine Botta, the campaign manager reported to Keith there weren’t enough votes to pull Mr. Aiken below the 40% threshold. He advised his campaign team to prepare a statement and a news release announcing his concession. I reached out to Gary Pearce mid-afternoon following Keith’s instructions.  He had planned to talk with Mr. Aiken at 10 a.m. Tuesday morning to concede.

Shortly after lunch, a freak fall in the front door of his house took his life.  What a tragedy. Suddenly, we all realize what a loss we have incurred.

So today Keith’s family, friends and supporters are grieving his loss, witnesses to his life and his tragic sudden death – all of us seeing reflections of our own mortality.