Allen Crise, former Vice President of Eduction for the Southern Council of the FFF, long-time moderator of the CCI Study Group, Legend of the Southern Council, Master Casting Instructor, father, husband, and friend passed away shortly after midnight after an 8 month battle with cancer.
Al was a good friend and mentor, and the bourbon is open in his honor tonight. Didn’t help any to learn last night my wife was wounded in Iraq.
I am so sorry to hear about your wife’s injury(ies). I admire her for serving her country and to preserve our many valuable freedoms, at great cost to herself and to her family. I feel for you. My wife had a 3 year run with cance: I felt very helpless during that experience. Keep your faith and ask unabashedly for what you, your wife, and family need. I am happy to listen if you’d like to talk or wish medical questions answered. Send me a PM if I can help.
Dana
I can’t even begin to put into words what I feel after your post. Hopefully YOUR WIFE will come home soon and mend quickly. I and my family appreciate her sacrifice and Thank You for telling us about her.
Mark
My heart aches for the Crise family and I pray that they will mend from their loss as God wills. I also pray for your wife’s rapid healing and return to family. All concerned are in my thoughts and prayers.
I hope your wife is ok & will be home with you soon. My thanks to her & your family for the sacrifices you all have made for the country. Please keep us up to date on her condition…
Flyguy66, Sorry to hear about Al. I just poured a shot in my coffee before I opened this thread.
The burbon is opened for him. And a shot for the wife for her service, Forgot this last night.
I am going to sip a bit of Grande Marinier in Al’s honour. I will raise my glass also in a grateful salute to your brave wife and will send a prayer for her speedy recovery.
I know they need her over there, but all the same I hope this speeds up her return to Home soil all in one piece. Give her my heartfelt thanks please.
i’ll toast your friend and wife with a chocolate rootbeer float. prayers for your wife, your friend and you. be cool man.
My wife’s injuries are not severe. She’ll be out of commission for a couple of weeks. She’s pretty bruised, scraped up, few cuts, pulled muscle in the shoulder, and a badly sprained ankle. She’s the gunner in an MRAP armored vehicle w/the 1st Armored Division and was knocked from the turret, which is about a 10’ fall onto a steel deck with a couple of bounces in between. Thanks for everyone’s concern. She’s where she wants to be doing what she wants to do. And her unit is already shorthanded and over-worked. So she certainly doesn’t want to come home. And like most soldiers, she’s most upset about being stuck in quarters recovering while her friends are still out there.
I am glad to hear her injuries are not severe. She is in our prayers as well as Al’s family.
Ken
thank you for posting the news. Al will continue to be a cornerstone of fly fishing despite no longer being directly on the scene. Good deeds ripple out and his good deeds are of unusual enormity!
I was shocked to see that your wife had been wounded - am relieved that it’s not worse than it was.
Prayers and a stiff drink in honor of Al and to the honor of your hard-working brave spouse.
I talked to her on Skype this morning, Robin. She’s more mad than anything, but pretty battered. They were being mortared the entire time we were talking and we had to reconnect several times due to comms problems. The helicopter gunships were flying in/out overhead non-stop. Seems the Iranians have supplied new equipment and training to the ne’er-do-wells and Al Qaeda remnants in Iraq. People who think that AQ and Iran don’t work together due to religious differences are fools. All Muslims work together in the face of “infidel invaders.” They always have. Oh well, enough of that. I sure am glad the war in Iraq is over now and the country is officially “pacified.” Aren’t you? LOL Don’t get this stuff on the news, do we?
Fly fishing has been very good to me in terms of the fine people I have met and developed relationships with over the years. Al Crise was in the very top category of those fine people. If I came up with a short list of my favorite folks in fly fishing, Al would be on it no matter what size it had to be. He was the kind of guy we all should strive to be more like: less self-centered and more focused on helping others, less concerned with non-essentials and more focused on getting the important things done, less apt to get bogged down by the negatives of life and more able to enjoy the many positives we encounter each and every day.
Let me tell you how I found out Al had cancer…
Last summer I was scheduled to take a day-long class from Al at his place in Glen Rose. The evening before he called to tell me we needed to move the start time back a few hours and go until dusk because he had to go to the hospital first thing in the morning for an upper and lower GI. He had not been able to eat due to pain for a couple of months and had lost about 50 lbs. This was going to put us outside in the hottest part of the day in the Texas summer heat, but he assured me would be OK and that another one of his students would be there to help out just in case.
The next day, we met and did the class - 7 hours in the hot Texas sun, casting, standing, and walking around in the field behind his house. We paused only for water breaks. He told me he would have the test result the next day, but he never let on that it was anything more serious than an ulcer.
The day after that Al called me to tell me he got his test results and that he had cancer in his esophagus. Within a few days, we knew it was also in his stomach, pancreas, liver, intestines, and brain.
I will never be able to shake the impact of this man taking that day of his life in the midst of all that he was dealing with to pull it together just to help me teach fly casting better. I am totally unable to process it.