Pat Crowley was inducted Tuesday into the Greater Cincinnati Journalism Hall of Fame, where WVXU’s Howard Wilkinson called him an extraordinary human being.
“Days before he died he was at the NKY convention center dishing out food to people who had nowhere else to go,” Wilkinson said at the Greater Cincinnati Society of Professional Journalists awards. “He did that for 15 years. That’s an extraordinary human being.”
Crowley, known across the region as Mr. Northern Kentucky, died in December 2024.
Society of Professional Journalists is the United States’ oldest organization representing journalists, holding annual regional awards ceremonies.
“There are bad guys and there are good guys, and he was definitely a good guy,” Wilkinson said in a video prepared for the event.
Dan Horn, a reporter who worked with Crowley at the Cincinnati Post, talked about what a hard worker he was.
“He was fun to be around,” Horn said in the video. “Great laugh. Hard worker. he just hustled like nobody’s business.”
What Enquirer reporter Terry DeMio remembers is his kindness.
“He’s charming in a way that very few people are,” DeMio said.
Crowley’s daughter, Shayna Nevermann, spoke at the event. She said what made her dad special was not just his toughness, but his fairness.
“He always got both sides of the story,” Nevermann said.
Nevermann is the vice president of strategic partners at Strategic Advisors, a marketing and communications firm Crowley started in 2009 with Jay Fossett, a former journalist and now the city administrator in Dayton.
“He was just a great person, a great friend and a great family man,” Fossett said in the video shown at the awards.
While she was on stage, Nevermann talked about how as a young boy, Crowley would run around asking the teachers questions. He was always meant to be a reporter, she said.
“He would annoy the nuns,” Nevermann said, prompting a laugh from the crowd.
Wilkinson talked about the one and only time Crowley, who at the time was a reporter at the Cincinnati Enquirer, made him angry.
They were covering a political convention and clocked about four hours of sleep a night. Crowley called Wilkinson at 3:30 am., worried because he had accidentally purchased an $8 movie on the company card. After he calmed down after having been woken up, Wilkinson realized something.
“That’s a pretty conscientious guy to be that worried about eight bucks,” Wilkinson said. “He was up in the middle of the night worrying about eight bucks on his expense report and I said, he’s a good guy.”