John Michael Cronin

1935 - 2019

John Michael Cronin

Gripping the overhead strap on a crowded New York subway, John Michael Cronin read Henry David Thoreau's "Walden" and dreamed of a place to put roots in the ground to raise his four daughters, a son on the way. He packed three of them, Teresa, Mary and Sharon, into a black station wagon and drove west, transferring his law practice to the Seattle office of the National Labor Relations Board. When his wife Margo Rainford and his youngest daughter Laura Jean arrived via airplane, they bought a house and lived for a year in Seattle's north Queen Anne neighborhood, where their son Terrence was born. The family moved to five acres on Bainbridge Island and within a year, the former Marine had built a log house, planted a large garden, dug post holes and strung fencing for horses, goats and chickens, all hand tools, all self-taught. He started the recycling center and swam in Puget Sound year round. And those books, on goat-herding, organic gardening and the art of concrete, still line the shelves of his cabin.

A wild streak ran through him professionally and personally and he did not tolerate the status quo dictating his life. When John married Margo in New York City in 1956, it was still illegal in half the states for a white man to marry a black woman. As a young couple raising their growing family, they rented an apartment in New Rochelle that triggered white flight. They ended up integrating the building within six months and reveled in stories about the camaraderie and fire escape barbeques that followed. He earned his JD from New York Law School, where he received American Jurisprudence Awards in Excellence in Labor Law and Equity. Justice governed his career as an attorney and he chose labor law to champion working people. He joined the NAACP and picketed outside New York City shops that would not hire African Americans and in Seattle marched with Cesar Chavez to support the grape boycott to end low pay and inhumane conditions for harvesters. After leaving the NLRB, he worked as general council for Teamsters Local 174 and United Classified Workers Union of Washington. With that steely twinkle in his serious blue eyes, he hinted at occasional unusual methods during contract negotiations, earning the admiration of like-minded colleagues including longtime friend Ron Flynn. After retiring, he arbitrated for the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, receiving a plaque of appreciation for his 30 years.

When his union with Margo ended, he met and soon married Susan Stavish in 1981, settling on Vashon Island with her son Sean and daughter Kathleen and honoring Jewish traditions. Together, they built a split level concrete and log house, planted a garden and fruit orchards and tended sheep, goats, llamas, alpacas, chickens and scores of crows. They shared a sense of humor, a love of hiking on Mt. Rainier and strolling ocean beaches. In 2012 cancer ended her life and he longed for her until the day he died. Stoic by nature, reminiscences of what he left behind in New York revealed his love for his parents, Michael Cornelius and Elizabeth Reynolds Cronin, his camaraderie with his Uncle Lawrence Reynolds and brother Neil Cronin and sister-in-law Annette, his pride in his brother's two sons Neil and Sean and four daughters Diedre, Renee, Tara and Maura and his joy in sharing stories with his cousin Laura Reynolds OSU, of New Rochelle. He delighted in a well spun story and told a few ribald ones, often about the family history of the Cronin, Reynolds, Rainford and Stavish clans and sometimes to the chagrin of his children and wife at the time. He spoke fondly of hiking Mt Marcy in New York's Adirondack mountains with Margo's cousins Milton, Peter and Henry before moving west. A story his grandfather Aubert Reynolds told him about the Yazoo Indian Chief Moncacht-Ape launched his seven-year quest to research and write, "Yazoo Mingo The Journeys of Moncacht-Ape Across North America 1687-1700." The 2002 book told of a transcontinental journey 100 years before Lewis and Clark, where Moncacht-Ape learned the ways of other nations after losing much of his to an epidemic.

A Renaissance man, he would expound on history at will, finish the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle by mid-morning, split wood singing folk songs with his spellbinding tenor voice and step lively on hikes to Mt Rainier, in short green shorts with a canteen of water, swatting flies with his T-shirt as he hiked, identifying flowers and spotting wildlife with his eagle sharp eyes. The thrill of ascending from the tree line into the alpine country or the mesmerizing pounding of a mountain waterfall soothed and stoked his wild nature.

John Michael Cronin was born May 5, 1935 in New York City, and took his last breath on August 19, 2019, in Kent, WA. He was predeceased by wife Susan and former wife Margo, his parents, two uncles, brother and sister-in-law and survived by five children, two step-children, five grandchildren, a great grandson on the way, six step grandchildren, one cousin, one sister-in-law, two nephews, four nieces, many grand nieces, nephews and their families.

We will celebrate his life

at 2:00 pm Sunday 9/15 at

MLK FAME Community Center,

3201 E. Republican St., Seattle.

Sign John's online Guest Book

at www.Legacy.com