Bill Crawford
Bill Crawford was born in New York City and attended the prep school Phillips Academy, Andover, and Harvard, where he received his undergraduate degree in the Comparative Study of Religion. He also earned an MBA in management from the University of Texas - Austin and worked briefly in the oil industry. For more than thirty years, Crawford lived in Austin, Texas where he worked as a media producer, writer, ghost writer and editor. He is a frequent contributor to the Austin Chronicle, Texas Monthly, and a number of other publications. Crawford has written or co-written more than a dozen books, including The United States Border Patrol (Putnam, 1965); Border Radio: Quacks, Yodelers, Pitchmen, Psychics, and Other Amazing Broadcasters of the American Airwaves (with Gene Fowler; Texas Monthly Press, 1987); Stevie Ray Vaughan: Caught in the Crossfire (with Joe Nick Patoski; Little, Brown, 1993); Cerealizing America: The Unsweetened Story of American Breakfast Cereal (with Scott Bruce; Faber & Faber, 1995); Texas Death Row: Executions in the Modern Era (Longstreet Press, 2000); Austin: A Pictorial History (American Historical Press, 2001); All American: The Rise and Fall of Jim Thorpe (Wiley, 2003); and Please Pass the Biscuits, Pappy (University of Texas Press, 2004). Several of his books have been optioned by the film industry. He has also ghost written or edited more than three dozen other publications, including memoirs, business histories, and self-help books. Crawford is the creator of The Dad Show, a talk-radio show for parents that ran for fifteen years on Austin radio and was funded by Child Incorporated, a manager of Head Start programs. Additionally, he spent five years working as a volunteer court-appointed special advocate for children in foster care with the organization CASA of Travis County. He worked on The Texas Quiz Show, a game show about Texas history for seventh-grade students who take Texas history in school. Crawford has also appeared as a humorous commentator on Fox News Channel, Fox and Friends, MSNBC, and C-SPAN, as well as Westwood I radio networks and dozens of other radio stations across the country. Crawford currently lives in a small town in Nuevo León, Mexico, where he writes creative non-fiction, swims, rides his bike, and drinks tequila.
