Profile -- Chad Crews
By: BILL BENGTSON
He and his family live in a house loaded with snakes, cockroaches and other creepy critters, but local kids still flock to Chad Crews' local appearances, for a mixture of summertime tricks and treats.
Crews, a native of Waynesboro, has lived in North Augusta for the past three years, and paid a June 17 visit to Nancy Carson Library, continuing a tradition of encouraging kids to read and dazzling them in the process.
"We have lots of animals and stuff, so I use all the snakes, of course, at the show, and our house is full," he said. "We have roaches -- hissing cockroaches -- and millipedes and several different types of snakes, tarantulas and scorpions and all that, and our little girl's just finding out about the snakes and the roaches and all, so she likes them a lot."
He added, "The rest of my family doesn't like it too much, but my wife and little girl like it."
As for the hocus-pocus business, he recalled, "I got into magic, actually, right out of college." Crew attended Shorter College, in Rome, Ga., in the process of becoming a Baptist youth pastor, eventually to serve in Rome and later in Waynesboro.
The metamorphosis into magic involved a mission trip to Savannah, shortly after he had learned a few card tricks from one of his favorite books, an encyclopedia of magic.
"We were with some inner-city kids, and some of them, we'd just grab them and take them to the Baptist Center there and feed them and play with them, but some of them wouldn't talk to you, so I said to some of our youth, 'Let's go learn a couple of these card tricks to show them.'"
The result, he said, was a smashing success, so he and his youth helpers learned a new magic trick each evening, looking to help break down walls between the mission team and their young Savannah neighbors.
"Right after that, I moved down to Waynesboro, where I started teaching, and as I was teaching, I was ... learning magic tricks, as well, and stated doing birthday parties and libraries during the summer, when I had time off."
He taught in extremely familiar territory, as an educator at Burke County Middle School and Burke County High School, both of which he had attended a few years earlier.
In the next step, he became a full-time pastor. He now serves in that role at Long Creek Baptist Church, in a pastoral family that includes his wife, Lindsay, and their daughter, Reagan, 2.
"We've been living in North Augusta for the last three years, and she's got one more year of her residency, and then she's done with that, so we're looking forward to that as well. She started med school when I moved down here to start teaching. She was going to med school at MCG, so she's been doing her med school and her residency all here," she said.
"We moved to North Augusta, actually, to be closer to the medical college, or when she's on call and things."
Crews may feel as if he's on call at times, particularly during the summer, with library shows throughout the Carolinas and Georgia. October is also an unusually busy period, with an assortment of Halloween-related events.
During the summer, features in his shows range from card tricks and snake appearances to a straitjacket escape, complete with chains, that takes almost two minutes (and an assortment of gyrations and leaps) to accomplish. Audience participation is a major part of the package.
Describing his attitude toward the presentations, he said, "I have as much fun as the kids do ... It's fun. It's exhausting, because of the straitjacket escape, but it gets such a good reaction. I don't ever want to take that out, either."
A sizeable chunk of his library presentation is dedicated to encouraging kids to read. A core part of the message, which listeners are encouraged to repeat, is that "good readers learn all kinds of things, meet all kinds of people and go on all kinds of adventures."
The shows, he noted, tend to stir up circulation. "The librarians like that, too. It's the audience -- the interaction with the audience -- that really is the fun part."
