02/24/2025
A wonderful friend to Hear, Here, Dr. Leslie Crocker, passed away last week. He was one of the first narrators we had lined up when Hear, Here was in its infant stage in 2014. Les moved to La Crosse in 1969 for his job as an art history professor at UWL. He was among the group of people who started the Preservation Alliance of La Crosse (PAL), and was the leading local architectural historian in the La Crosse area. He loved La Crosse's built environment with every fiber of his being (except brutalism) (and stucco) (and vines and trees that cover buildings) (and he wasn't the biggest fan of Gothic architecture), and it showed in his dedicated studies, which he continued up until his last few months.
One of our favorite things about Les is his southern drawl and the opinionated way in which he talked about architecture and history. If you want to get a taste of who he was, listen to his Hear, Here story about the time he and a colleague saved archival documents from a pigeon-infested attic downtown in 1978:
In 1978 art history professor Les Crocker went down to visit the Odin J. Oyen building to meet with Leighton Oyen. Once there, he and his colleague discovered that many of the company’s original designs and drawings still existed in the old building. Now that collection is housed at the University...
