Many people in Cabot know him simply as Coach Crouch, but Eugene Crouch has more than sports in his background when it comes to “field experience.” He started and ended his working years as a school coach, but Crouch also spent 25 years as an agent with the FBI, seeing the country and investigating crimes.
In a house on a quiet street in Cabot, Crouch is now surrounded daily by memories. The brown leather easy chair he sits in while watching television rocks next to a bookcase filled with Cabot Public School yearbooks, Razorback memorabilia and a Rotarian of the Year award. He has coasters with the FBI logo on them to protect his end tables, and the house is decorated with his mother-in-law’s paintings of Philadelphia and the surrounding area.
Crouch grew up in the small east-Arkansas town of Lexa and graduated from Barton High School. His early years were spent in a two-room schoolhouse in Lexa before the town’s school system combined with neighboring Barton.
“[The Lexa school house] just had a partition,” he said. “We had first, second and third grade on one side of the partition and fourth, fifth and sixth grade on the other. When my friend and I were in the third grade, we were the only two in that grade. My sister and her friend were the only two in the second grade at that time, so we did everything together. When we moved up to the fourth grade when we consolidated with Barton, they just moved up with us. My sister finished first in our class.”
Even with the consolidation, Crouch was one of only 14 members of the 1961 Barton High School graduating class. Because of the small numbers, athletic students were able to participate in sports all year long, and he took full advantage of this opportunity.
“We had about 30 boys in the whole high school, and about 28 of them played football,” Crouch said. “So I played football and basketball, and when we had track, I ran track. I played baseball also, and in the summers, I played American Legion baseball for Helena (now Helena-West Helena). We won the state baseball championship in 1960.”
His time in high school sports paid off when it came time to go to college. Crouch went to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, initially attending on a football scholarship. He practiced through his sophomore year and ended up majoring in physical education.
After graduation, Crouch moved back to east Arkansas to be a coach at Brinkley High School. One year later, some of his fellow former Razorbacks got him a coaching job in El Dorado, where he worked for three years.
During his time in El Dorado, his life took an unexpected turn when he was overseeing a job fair hosted by the high school for the soon-to-be high school graduates. There were two FBI agents at the job fair putting the word out about jobs for those who had completed or were completing high school, and Crouch struck up a conversation with one of them.
“In the old days before computers, the Bureau recruited high school graduates, especially stenographers,” he said. “There was an old agent and a young agent at this career day, and I just happened to step over and listen to them. The young agent and I started talking, and he told me, ‘We’re hiring right now, if you have an interest.’”
Crouch decided he had an interest. He got more information from the agent, including an application, and applied for a job. He was called into the FBI’s Little Rock field office for an interview, and after taking a battery of tests, he was hired.
“I had to take a general-knowledge test with a lot of history, a law test — they really just wanted to see how you worded things — and a spelling test,” he said. “I remember one of the words. One of the guys told me to learn how to spell this word, even if you don’t know any other one: The word ‘bureau.’ B-U-R-E-A-U. And it was on there. It was a 50-word spelling test.”
Crouch may have interviewed in the Little Rock office, but that did not mean he got to stay in his home state. His first year with the Bureau was in Philadelphia, where he met his future wife, Sue.
“She was a receptionist at the Philly office,” he said. “She met everyone who came into that FBI office.”
After one year in Philadelphia working general criminal matters, Crouch was transferred to New York City, where he worked bank robberies for six years.
“I went from a town of 100 [in Arkansas] to the Big Apple,” he said.
The last two years of his time in New York, Crouch was the coordinator for bank-robbery investigations, and the job kept him very busy.
“We had a squad of 40 guys,” he said. “Just about every corner of New York had a bank. My last year there, I think we had 565 bank robberies. That includes attempts.
“I remember one we had. This guy came in and passed this note that said, ‘Give me all your $10s, $20s and $30s.’ He robbed more than one bank, so we knew we were going for the same guy.”
Another memorable case Crouch was involved in has since inspired a movie. Dog Day Afternoon is based on a bank robbery in Brooklyn where the FBI — including Crouch — had to get involved. The bank robbers had taken hostages in an attempt to negotiate their way out of the bank, into a limousine, onto an airplane and out of the country with money for a sex-reassignment surgery in Europe.
“It wasn’t my case, but I was there when it happened,” Crouch said. “I was there that night. My ex-partner at the time, he’s the one that killed the guy.”
In 1975, there were two FBI agents who were killed on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. A group of Native Americans who called themselves AIM — the American Indian Movement — was demonstrating in the hopes of gaining complete sovereignty from the United States government, Crouch said, and two agents were killed in the crossfire of this demonstration. Crouch was sent out there for several months on a special assignment to handle the investigation, and after a brief return to New York, he was sent back to South Dakota on a permanent basis.
After his time in South Dakota, Crouch made a move closer to home when he was assigned to Oklahoma City. He was there for 3 1/2 years when he got his OP — office of preference — and was able to move to the Little Rock office in April 1981.
“Usually on a transfer, you can turn them down at least once before they check your loyalty and send you somewhere you don’t want to go,” he said. “I had Little Rock on my list from the time I started with the Bureau. It was a desirable office. It was small, and it was in the South. A lot of people came through here who weren’t from Arkansas.”
Crouch worked for the Bureau in Little Rock for nearly 14 years before he retired in January 1995. He didn’t stay out of work for long, though. Before he had even retired, he was approached by the Cabot Public Schools superintendent and athletic director at a basketball game, asking if he would be interested in working for the school district.
“Dr. [Larry] Rogers and coach [Johnny] White said, ‘coach [Charlie] Donham is moving up in the administration,’” Crouch recalled. “‘We need someone to take his PE classes for the rest of the semester. Coach Malham said he would hire you for a coaching job.’ It opened up in the junior high, and I came out as an assistant coach. That’s how I got back into coaching.”
Crouch started coaching various sports and teaching physical education the same month he retired from the FBI. The majority of his time as a Cabot coach was at the junior high schools, but he also worked one year at the high school. He ended up leaving coaching behind in 2003 to care for his wife full time. Sue, who had multiple sclerosis, required 24-hour care, and she died in January 2013. Crouch said it was best that he was with her in her later years, but if things had been different, he would have continued coaching.
Crouch will be the honoree at this year’s Cabot Scholarship Foundation Roast and Toast Banquet on March 10. At the event, Crouch will be roasted by James Handley, Ken Hatfield and Mike Malham. This will be the 20th Cabot Scholarship Foundation banquet, an annual event that honors students receiving scholarships from the foundation, which anticipates awarding $100,000 in scholarships that night.
Tickets for the Cabot Scholarship Foundation Roast and Toast Banquet are available for $30 each or $240 for a table of eight. Tickets may be purchased from Cabot Scholarship Foundation members or at the Cabot High School main office.
Staff writer Angela Spencer can be reached at (501) 244-4307 or aspencer@arkansasonline.com.