Thu | Mar 28, 2024

‘Crosby was more than just a driver’

Gleaner colleagues join family in mourning dedicated worker

Published:Saturday | August 14, 2021 | 12:07 AM
Steffano Crosby (second right), son of Errol Crosby, looks on as workmen from Sunset Burial Park in Shooters Hill, St Andrew, carry the coffin bearing the remains of the former Gleaner driver for interment yesterday.
Steffano Crosby (second right), son of Errol Crosby, looks on as workmen from Sunset Burial Park in Shooters Hill, St Andrew, carry the coffin bearing the remains of the former Gleaner driver for interment yesterday.
Errol Crosby.
Errol Crosby.
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On Friday, July 20, Errol Crosby, a long-serving Gleaner driver, made his transition into the ancestral realms. The news of his departure did not make the major headlines, but his former colleagues at The Gleaner are still jolted by his sudden stop.

Crosby was a jovial, personable, willing, and diligent member of the Gleaner family for 25 years, and was recently recognised for his decades of yeoman service, which was not limited to taking staff to and from assignments all over the island, night and day.

“Crosby was more like a caring father, transporting his children from day to day and getting them to where they needed to go safe and sound,” Gleaner Editor-in-Chief Kaymar Jordan said of the man whose passing has been a blow to her personally.

She recalled that Crosby was the first person she met when she came to Jamaica and The Gleaner.

“And, from then on, I have always felt connected to him in a very special way, as though he always had my back,” she explained.

“For us in the Editorial Department, Errol Crosby was more than just a driver/photographer. He was a loyal confidant and a friend who took every assigned task seriously,” Jordan added.

She was supported by former editor-in-chief and present general manager of The Gleaner Company (Media) Ltd, Garfield Grandison, who said, “Errol Crosby was a highly professional, dedicated worker, an extremely loyal family man, and a true friend.”

Great family man and a friend

Though Crosby was not part of the Multimedia Unit, to the members, he was “that glue, the one you could call on at all times when in a jam”, asserted Ricardo Makyn, chief photo editor, who also described him as a “great family man and a friend to all” who “will be hugely missed”.

Makyn recalled that Crosby was “one who believed in black unification, and that was something he held close to his heart”.

And, as Crosby, who was laid to rest yesterday, travelled the length and breadth of Jamaica, he observed and listened, and learned about Jamaica’s history and heritage, the stories of his African ancestors and the spaces in which they toiled and died. He was an avid listener and student of a local radio Afrocentric programme.

Over the years, he would sometimes let go of the steering wheel and peep through the lens of his camera, capturing images of challenges, joy and pain, and redemption.

“I remember also the pride he felt when his photographs were published in the newspapers, but nothing came close to his excitement over winning his first PAJ Award in 2019 for a human-interest photograph, … which I am proud to say still hangs in my office today,” Jordan said.

Crosby’s absence from The Gleaner’s Editorial Department is palpable, and will continue to be so for some time.

Illness might have terminated his assignments in this realm, but there is no doubt he is going to continue to press the gas moderately wherever he has gone to. So, the entire Gleaner family says, “Farewell, and drive good, as usual.”

Despite the absence, Grandison also said, “I will always remember Crosby; his family and his friends will always love him, too, as we believe in what concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl said, ‘Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved.’”