Meet your fellow subscriber: John Craw

A regular series of mini-biographies on my subscribers. Want one written on you, by me? Subscribe, then send me your life story to this point, in a nutshell, to adater@comcast.net and we’ll go from there.

SUBSCRIBER: JOHN CRAW (@Crawdaddy32)

By Adrian Dater

Remember Circuit City? As a 1998 graduate of CU Denver in 1998, John Craw went to work for the now-defunct electronics company in their marketing department, for their “sports and event marketing” department.

A hockey nut, John was at the very first Avalanche game in history, the Oct. 6, 1995, game against Detroit. He still has the ticket stub to prove it.

John was three years into his career at Circuit City and seemingly content when, on a Sept. 11, 2001, flight from Charlotte, N.C., to Tampa, word came into the cockpit from air traffic control: Make an emergency landing, now. It was after he landed and caught up on the awful news of that day that John Craw had an epiphany:

“Nothing made more of an impression on me than that day and the fact that 343 firefighters and countless other first responders laid down their lives to try and save the lives of those trapped in the towers,” Craw says. “The events of that day made me think very hard about my life and the fact that if I left the world that day, I had done nothing to help others.”

John heard of a program in Knoxville, Tenn., where he might be able to get into being a firefighter. So, he decided to chuck it all at Circuit City and go for a new life in Tennessee. Today, he is a firefighter in the town of Maryville, about 20 minutes south of Knoxville.

His life was transformed with that move to Tennesse, all right, but forget about him turning into a Predators fan, too. He’s “the only die-hard Avs fan in Maryville, probably the only one in Eastern Tennessee for that matter.”

No, thank YOU, John. All the best, and welcome to the Colorado Hockey Now family.

TAKE FIVE (QUESTIONS)