Michael Stanley Cram
Michael Stanley Cram was born at Stanford Hospital on July 13, 1941, to Margaret Henderson of Kentucky and Henry Stanley Cram of Missouri. They didn’t linger long, and within months, the family returned to Bridgehaven, the ancestral Henderson homestead in Ashland, Kentucky. Life moved at the pace of the seasons, and Mike, with his younger brother Steve, lived the kind of postwar, hijinks-filled Appalachian childhood Mark Twain would’ve appreciated. When Mike wasn’t playing basketball, he was dreaming about the world outside Ashland. He had to see it! At seventeen, he brought home a spider monkey he’d acquired in West Virginia. His mother gave him a choice: either the monkey goes, or he does. He left that evening and hit the road for greener pastures.
Basketball ended up being his ticket out of Ashland, and after graduating at the top of his class from Columbia Military Academy in Tennessee, he received a full basketball scholarship to the University of Houston. At 6’2”, he wasn’t the quickest or the tallest, but he played fiercely, and his jump shot was ahead of its time. Was he destined for the burgeoning NBA? Would he graduate and find gainful corporate employment? Increasingly, he thought about these two unlikely outcomes. There’s a saying that everything loose in this country eventually rolls to Los Angeles. After thinking it over for about fifteen minutes, he loaded everything he owned into a 1952 Studebaker and pointed it west. Almost instinctively, he landed in Manhattan Beach. The year was 1963. He had made it to the promised land!
Mike’s career as an entrepreneur started shortly after, and his pursuit of the “next big idea” led to dozens of businesses, products, and half-mad schemes, each more fantastic than the last. At one point, he owned the largest wig salon west of the Mississippi, right in the middle of Hollywood. He partnered with talented artists to design ceramics from Brazil. For a time, he kept an office in the Empire State Building, where he designed sportswear. There were singing greeting cards, sports memorabilia, and novelty watches. There were novels (Tennis Players Have Fuzzy Balls), scripts, and all sorts of projects that Mike pursued with a tenacity that never faded his entire life.
He also had a gift for discovering the beaches, bars, and mountain towns knocking on the door of the American collective consciousness. Hip places with hip people on the verge of their cultural zeitgeist. Imagine the coolest scene, from Mazatlán to Rio to no-name towns in Europe. Before the yuppies and realtors arrived, before the culture, but after the party started. Mike was probably there! When California started to feel too familiar, Mike loaded up his car full of wig money and drifted north to Sun Valley Idaho. An early pioneer of the ski-bum lifestyle, he got 80 to 100 days a year on the hill through most of the ’70s, living in a log cabin with his giant Alaskan Malamute, Lobo. Eventually, he conceded that he needed to get to a “9-to-5 city” and headed for Seattle.
A chance meeting at an airport led Mike to the love of his life, and he married flight attendant Barbara Jo Detmer in 1986. First came Bo, the Labrador, and a few years later, their son, Zachary. They lived in Telluride, Colorado, in the mid-’90s and settled on Bainbridge Island in 1997. As a father, Mike made imagination part of everyday life, stories at bedtime, old movies on weekends, and wild ideas to tinker with. He taught Zack persistence and gave everyone around him the confidence to follow their own path.
Mike’s biggest hit came around 2004 when he launched the talking beer opener. There were versions that played just about every college fight song, and everything from The Simpsons slogans to the I Love Lucy theme song. You probably had one. Inspired by that success and his lifelong love of movies, Mike wrote and produced a full-length feature film titled Ingenious, starring Jeremy Renner. He did it with no experience, no industry connections, and all at the ripe age of sixty-seven. The film closed the Santa Barbara International Film Festival and won Best Picture at the Phoenix Film Festival.
Mike spent his later years staying warm in the desert, sharing beautiful sunsets with Barb and chasing the dream in their own quiet way. Sadly, Barb passed away last year, and Mike’s health struggles proved harder to bear without her by his side. He joined her on August 16, just a few months shy of meeting his new granddaughter Margot.
He is survived by his son, Zachary, and daughter-in-law, Courtney, of Santa Barbara; his brother, Steve, of Falls Church; and his beloved sisters-in-law, Pat and Susie Detmer, of Seattle.
Those who knew Mike will remember his stories, and those who loved him will remember his spirit. One of a kind, straight out of a movie. He will be deeply missed.
“Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams, this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness, and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!”
