Trammell Crow

Fred Trammell Crow (June 10, 1914 – January 14, 2009) was an American real estate developer from Dallas, Texas. He is credited with the creation of several major real estate projects, including the Dallas Market Center, Peachtree Center in Atlanta, Georgia, and the Embarcadero Center in San Francisco, California.

Biography

A native of Dallas, Crow as a child and later as an adolescent earned money through a series of odd jobs, including plucking chickens, cleaning bricks, and unloading boxcars, from the age of ten until his father forbade it. He was the fifth of eight children reared in East Dallas. His father, Jefferson Crow, worked as a bookkeeper for Collett Munger – one of Dallas' early real estate developers and the builder of Munger Place subdivision. Unable to attend college at the time because of the Great Depression, Crow worked after high school at odd jobs. In 1933, Crow landed a job for about $13 a week as a runner for Mercantile National Bank in Dallas.

After completing Woodrow Wilson High School in 1932, he worked for a Dallas bank and attended night school in accounting at Southern Methodist University. Upon graduation in 1938, he was at the age of twenty-four the youngest CPA in Texas. He then worked for three years as a Certified Public Accountant before joining the United States Navy in 1940. He utilized his background in accounting and was offered a commission auditing the books of defense contractors. After World War II, he remained with the Navy for another year to handle final settlements with its contractors. He then returned to Dallas and saw opportunities for the growth of the city. He became an agent for North American Van Lines, a moving company. Shortly thereafter, he worked as a wholesale grain merchandiser, tripled the sizes of the warehouses, and erected new loading facilities. Once the grain business faded, he switched at the age of thirty-three to the burgeoning field of warehouse real estate development.