The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
CROMWELL ‘WEAR OUT, DON’T RUST OUT’
Belden librarian, vocalist, onetime aviator, 68, retiring after 15 years
CROMWELL » A man of many parts, Terry Crescimanno retires Monday after a 15-year career as adult librarian at the Cromwell Belden Public Library.
“It’s really my third career,” the relaxed and affable Crescimanno said during an interview earlier this week.
A Middletown native, Crescimanno arrived at the library having already been a naval aviator flying P-3 Orion antisubmarine and maritime surveillance tracking aircraft and working as a Cobalt programmer at Aetna.
And that doesn’t include Crescimanno’s interests in genealogy and his career as a choral singer — not to mention being a husband and a father.
Libraries were part of Crescimanno’s life long before he ever considered working in one.
No matter where he went or what he did, Crescimanno always got a library card. It was important to him when he was a child growing up and it was important when he was navigating long missions hunting for Soviet submarines during the depths of the Cold War.
“Wherever I was, whether it was Jacksonville or Pensacola, I always got a library card,” Crescimanno said.
And when his squadron was temporarily reassigned to Naval Air Station Sigonella, Sicily, it gave Crescimanno the opportunity to search for his ancestors.
As any good son of Middletown would during a visit to Sicily, Crescimanno made a pilgrimage to Melilli. A tally of the residents who live there “looks like the Middletown phone book!” Crescimanno reports. In all, he spent nearly six
years on active duty in naval aviation and three more years in the Naval Reserves.
Having had experience with computers in the Navy, Crescimanno made an easy transition to working for Aetna as Cobalt programmer. Even as he was doing so, however, his wife, Patricia McCurdy Crescimanno, “was working to get her master’s in library science from Southern (Connecticut State University),” Crescimanno said.
It got him to thinking, he said.
“I was in my early 40s, and I thought that might be something I’d want to do,” he said.
As he weighed making yet another career change, Crescimanno said he did not want to look back on his life and see “a shoulda/ coulda/woulda moment.”
And so he enrolled in “school full-time to get my master’s degree in the early ‘90s,” he said. Drawing on his training and experience as a programmer, he got a job in charge of the computer room for the Capital Region Library Council
“Most of it was behindthe-scenes stuff,” Crescimanno said.
But he eventually “got the chance to work as a reference librarian at a couple of libraries in the area,” jobs that appealed to him because “I like people.”
In 2002, the adult librarian position at Cromwell Belden opened up and he grabbed it. “It was a good choice,” Crescimanno said. “I’m not kicking myself about ‘coulda shoulda woulda.’ It’s been a good gig.”
“I’ve met a lot of nice people, people I know from Middletown and even some of my former teachers from New Britain,” he said. “I can deal with people — all kinds of people.
“I like helping people, whether it’s a kid doing a homework project or someone who’s looking for information about used cars,” he said. “I like to talk — and I like to listen,” Crescimanno said.
“And, I’m always learning something in this job,” he said, explaining his role “is like information navigation.”
And then there is singing. “I sing with two groups,” Crescimanno said, The Choral Club of Hartford, a 115-year-old all-male choral group, and Rock Voices, which bills itself as “America’s community rock choir.”
For five years, both Terry and Mary Crescimanno have sung with the choir, which performs from West Hartford north through the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts up to Brattleboro, Vermont.
The group performs “rock music from the ‘50s up to today,” Crescimanno said.
A Rock Voices concert can begin with the Four Seasons and continue across the decades to include an Amy Winehouse song, he said.
“You don’t have to audition to get into the choir but you do have to audition to do a solo” — which Crescimanno has done. “You meet a lot of nice people through the group and it’s been proven that singing is good for your health.”
He is also president of the Italian Club of New Britain, “and that keeps me busy,” he said.
He and Mary have two daughters, one who just graduated from the University of Massachusetts with a major in English and a minor in linguistics. Their other daughter is married and lives in Chicago, where she and her husband “are ‘theater techs’ who spend a lot of time on the road handling props, costumes, hair, as well as sound and lighting,” Crescimanno said.
The couple just returned from a vacation visiting their daughter in Chicago “and attending a Jimmy Buffett concert with 41,000 other parrotheads at Wrigley Field,” he said.
Mary works for the Donohue Group Inc., a library management company in Windsor.
Now 68, Crescimanno said he is ready for whatever comes next. He lives by a credo handed down to him from a friend of longstanding: “It’s better to wear out than to rust out.”