Tiburon adman John Crawford was behind SF Giants’ anti-mascot Crazy Crab

John Crawford, the Tiburon advertising executive who created the San Francisco Giants’ notorious anti-mascot Crazy Crab, died May 27 at his home following complications from multiple health issues. He was 83.

Crawford’s nearly half-century career in advertising included developing campaigns for Round Table Pizza and the Yellow Pages, but he became best known for his work with the Giants in the 1980s, when he conceived both the deliberately obnoxious Crazy Crab and the beloved Croix de Candlestick commemorative pin.

His death was announced online Aug. 11.

The Crazy Crab phenomenon

Crazy Crab was introduced before the 1984 season to rile up fans, players and management during an era when teams were introducing family-friendly mascots. Giants fans loathed the trend — 63% of respondents in a 1983 poll said they would boo any mascot, The Athletic reported in 2020.

The team’s dismal 66-96 record, baseball’s worst that year, and Candlestick Park’s brutal conditions made fans even more hostile.

“When we sent him out past the bleachers at the Stick, it was like sending him into a bull ring,” Crawford told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2008 for a Crazy Crab retrospective ahead of a bobblehead giveaway. “We had to reinforce the suit with a fiberglass shell for protection.”

After facing attacks and body slams from Giants and visiting players, including current broadcaster and 1984 Giants pitcher Mike Krukow and future World Series-winning manager Bruce Bochy, as well as a barrage of batteries, golf balls and balloons filled with water and urine, Crazy Crab was eliminated after just one season.

The mascot has since attained cult status among fans and has been likened, including by MLB.com, as a prototype to Gritty, the Philadelphia Flyers’ mascot that has built a reputation as a raucous, edgy presence in the NHL and professional sports. Occasionally, Crazy Crab makes appearances, still to a chorus of boos, as he did during a July 27 ceremony honoring current, more beloved mascot Lou Seal’s 2024 induction into the Mascot Hall of Fame.

Crawford also helped develop the Croix de Candlestick, the commemorative pin handed out to fans who endured Candlestick Park’s cold and winds during extra-inning night games. The pin featured the Latin phrase “veni, vidi, vixi,” or “I came, I saw, I lived.”

Crawford described fans who attended as either devoted or drunk as he recalled his first nighttime game at the park to The Athletic.

“Nighttime baseball is supposed to mean balmy summer nights,” Crawford told the publication. “It was (expletive) freezing.”

Chronicle columnist Peter Hartlaub called the pins “one of the greatest traditions in local sports — almost single-handedly making this cold and cruddy ballpark kind of cool.”

“John was a very kind man, a creative genius and loved the Giants,” team President and CEO Larry Baer said in an Aug. 12 statement to The Ark. “His creativity conceiving the Crazy Crab, the Croix de Candlestick and other Giants campaigns will endure for decades to come.”

Early life and career

John Henry Crawford was born Feb. 15, 1942, in Boston to chauffeur John C. Crawford and cook Margaret Robinson as the younger of two children. Both parents were Irish immigrants who met after moving to the U.S. The family moved to the nearby suburb of Brookline, President John F. Kennedy’s birthplace, where Crawford grew up.

His parents instilled a love of reading, according to sister Nancy Sanftner of San Anselmo, and he’d been a writer since his youth. At one point he wrote about his birth taking place during a World War II blackout, when lights were purposely kept off to avert potential enemy attacks.

In 1962, Crawford had a humor article published in The Atlantic, “A Plea for Physical Fatness,” where he called on the U.S. to ramp up its Cold War efforts against the Soviet Union by resorting to obesity amid the nation’s health-consciousness efforts.

“While our svelte first family cavorts energetically about the White House lawns, in what shape do we find the wily Russian premier and his wife?” he wrote. “The answer to this question, however simple, is revealing: round!”

“He was always writing things that were very clever,” Sanftner said.

Crawford attended Tufts University in nearby Medford, Massachusetts, initially studying engineering before switching to English at Sanftner’s suggestion. Part of the major switch came after the only thing he wrote in an advanced physics final exam was “nolo contendere,” or “I don’t contest it,” San Jose Mercury News West Magazine reported in a 1985 cover story on Crawford. He graduated at age 20, Sanftner said.

After college, Crawford worked as a copywriter at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in New York City, then at Doyle Dane Bernbach as creative group head and at Hoefer Dietrich & Brown as creative director. He also led companies in radio and commercial directing.

In the 1980s, he was hired by the Giants as a copywriter and provided advertising consulting. At the urging of fellow marketing professionals, Crawford told the Crazy Crab costume’s designer to “make it look bad” and wrote lyrics to the theme song with the intent of “making it corny,” The Athletic reported.

“I was shocked that they were going for it,” Crawford told The Athletic. “Normally you float them an idea that’s shocking and a little weird, and then you present the idea that you really expect them to go with. We never expected them to go with it. And when they did, we were like, ‘Oh crap. Now we’ve got to go through with this.’”

His advertising prowess went beyond the Giants, as the 1985 West Magazine article credited Crawford with Bay Area-based Round Table Pizza’s rise to become the top chain in California, thanks to ads with the late San Francisco comedian Bill Bonham as a “guileless pizza cook.”

Culver City resident and one-time collaborator Rich Siegel hired Crawford in the early 1990s to direct commercials for a car-sale campaign. Siegel said Crawford would help by asking questions for their films and fine-tuning concepts for the ads.

“He just improvised a lot, he was very much like a Jonathan Winters kind of character,” Siegel said. “And he gave us more footage than we could ever use.”

Crawford retired in the late 2000s, Sanftner said.

Life in Tiburon

Crawford moved to the Tiburon Peninsula in the 1970s, living first in San Francisco, then Belvedere Island before settling on Mar East Street overlooking Racoon Strait in 1984, Sanftner said. He lived there until his death.

The year he moved to Tiburon he married Norah Elliott, whom he met at a dinner party. Though Crawford had no children of his own, Elliott brought three from a previous marriage: Ted, Kate and Barry. The couple remained together until Elliott’s death in 2023.

The two traveled to Europe each September, spending at least a week in Paris. Elliott’s affection for Crawford’s Irish relatives endeared her to Crawford, Sanftner said.

Sanftner said her brother enjoyed working with creative people during his career and loved “the intellectual part” of devising ads. She said her brother never expected to have lasting campaigns.

“He was very much oriented toward human beings, other human beings and loved to tell stories, and he was very observant,” she said, adding that “anything that someone said, he would remember it.”

Part of that desire for human interaction came from the family’s upbringing and the people they socialized with, Sanftner said: gardeners, chauffeurs, cooks, handymen. That became what was most important to him.

“He was someone you loved to be around,” Sanftner said. “When you saw Uncle John, or my brother, coming, you knew you were in for a good evening.”

Siegel echoed that sentiment.

“A lot of people in the business have an ego,” Siegel said. “He didn’t have an ego about anything. He just wanted to make the best work.”

Crawford told West Magazine the industry was “nothing more than a shtick” and that “most of the stuff people buy is discretionary junk.”

“You use the advertising message to get your message across,” he said. “The stuff that works always has a personal feel. This is my campaign against the junk merchants of our time.”

Crawford was preceded in death by his parents and his wife. He is survived by his sister, Nancy Sanftner of San Anselmo; stepchildren Ted, Kate and Barry; three grandchildren; Sanftner’s children and grandchildren; and several cousins and extended family in Ireland.

A celebratory service was held Aug. 3 in San Rafael. Donations can be made in Crawford’s name to Doctors Without Borders at give.doctorswithoutborders.org.

Reach Francisco Martinez at 415-944-4634.