Richard Crockford, teacher, college president, and sailor

As an academic and as a liberal with a capital L, Richard E. Crockford wore his learning lightly and his politics wherever he could find a place to post his beliefs.

"The back of his car was weighted down with anti-George Bush bumper stickers," said his son, Jeremy of Marlborough.

Mr. Crockford's mind was as crowded as his car's bumper, only the words in his head usually formed long passages of poetry he could recite at will until his last weeks, poems by T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, and many others.

"He started rattling off Elizabeth Barrett Browning not long ago, and he would say, 'I can't believe I can still do that,' " his son said.

A former president of Dean Junior College in Franklin, Mr. Crockford preferred the ripple of a sail as he sliced through waves to the rustle of administrative paperwork on his desk. He died of cancer Sept. 28 in his Mattapoisett home. Mr. Crockford was 80.

Although he served 19 years as president of Dean and before that 17 years as a professor, vice president, and dean at Colby Junior College in New London, N.H., Mr. Crockford was happiest in a boat.

"He was a scholar, but there wasn't anything scholarly about him," his son said. "He read constantly, but he was an avid sailor. At the end, it wasn't really his academic career he talked about. He talked about being 18, being 19, being 20 and sailing around the waters of Florida when it was a really rural place. He would sail up and down the coast with his brother and sleep on the beach when the jungle came right down to the sand."

That boyhood in Florida also formed him politically. Mr. Crockford's stepfather owned a 500-acre farm in Coral Gables and a home in Maine that the family used during summer to avoid the Florida heat, but they were keenly aware of the economic duress others endured.

"I grew up during the Depression on a farm where seldom a week passed without desperate homeless men coming to the door to seek work or a meal," he wrote in a letter to the editor published in the Globe in 2002.

When Mr. Crockford was a boy, his son said, he would ride to Miami with his father and brother to give away eggs to long lines of destitute people. "He never forgot it," his son said.

Mr. Crockford also never forgot that the Republican Party controlled the White House and Congress during his early boyhood, writing to the Globe in a letter published in 1995: "Since I was a child during the Depression, conventional wisdom has depicted the GOP as the rapacious party of the rich and the enemy of the poor and middle class, and, lo and behold, they now seem to be determined to live up to that label."

He was could be just as frank in academia. In 1990, he terminated the contracts of two business professors at Dean when enrollment in their department dropped. Angry faculty members passed a no-confidence motion against Mr. Crockford, and the college's board of trustees responded with vote of confidence in the president.

"I learned a long time ago you don't make many friends in this job because you frequently have to make unpopular decisions for the best of the college," Mr. Crockford told the Globe in 1990.

"People either love him or hate him," Mark Robinson, then a member of Dean's board of trustees, said in 1990. "But regardless of how they feel, President Crockford has made Dean what it is today."

Mr. Crockford's daughter Kate of Jamaica Plain said her father "didn't mince words."

"At times it could be a bit much, but when he did like something or tell you that something you had done was great or wonderful, you believed him," she said.

After graduating as valedictorian of Ponce De Leon High School in Coral Gables, Mr. Crockford lied about his age - he was 17 - in order to join the Navy at the end of World War II, his family said. He served on a subchaser.

After the war, Mr. Crockford graduated in 1950 from Bowdoin College in Maine with a degree in government and in 1955 from Boston University with a master's degree in English.

He began teaching that year at Colby Junior College, which was renamed Colby-Sawyer College in 1975.

"He certainly was one of the most dynamic English teachers at the college," Hilary Cleveland, professor emeritus, said in a statement released by the college.

Mr. Crockford married Claire Coddaire in 1955. They had four children and later divorced. She died a decade ago.

He married Julie Ahlman, and they had two children.

"My father was 55 when I was born," said Kate, his youngest child. "He was very comfortable and confident as a parent in a way that most of my friends' parents were not, because he had already raised five kids before me."

Mr. Crockford retired from Dean Junior College in 1991, three years before it was renamed Dean College.

During retirement, as in the rest of his life, he was rarely without a dog, the larger the better.

"He was crazy about dogs," his son said. "At one point we sat, he and I, and he said, 'I wonder how many dogs I've had?' He said you can kind of measure your life in dogs if you've always have one. He said he'd had an eight-dog life, maybe a nine-dog life. But he was only counting the main ones."

In addition to his wife, son, and daughter, Mr. Crockford leaves two sons, Richard Jr. of Laconia, N.H., and Seth of New York City; two daughters, Elizabeth and Lisa, both of New London, N.H.; and six grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. Nov. 17 in the multipurpose room of the Campus Center at Dean College.