Buster Crabbe - Later Years and Death

Later Years and Death

Crabbe's Hollywood career waned somewhat in the 1950s and 1960s. The ever-industrious Crabbe became a stockbroker and businessman during this period. According to David Ragan's "Movie Stars of the '30s", Crabbe even owned a Southern California swimming pool building company in later years. In the mid-1950s, Crabbe purchased the campus of a small defunct prep school near Onchiota, New York, in the Adirondack Mountains. Renamed Buster Crabbe's Meenahga Lodge the camp advertised itself as swim camp for youngsters age eight to 14, with at least one swim instructor from Hawaii. Using the school's auditorium, along with professionally made costuming and scenery, a couple of musical plays were staged by the campers during the summer under the guidance of several counselors with drama training. Although scheduled to make at least one appearance at the camp each summer, while filming Captain Gallant of the Foreign Legion, he supposedly needed an emergency appendectomy which prevented his attending.

During this period of his life, Buster joined the swimming pool company Cascade Industries of Talmadge Road, Edison, New Jersey. In his capacity as Vice President of Sales, promoter and spokesman for Cascade - the world's first "package pool" company - he attended shopping mall openings and fairgrounds combining promotion of his swim camps and Cascade vinyl liner in-ground swimming pools. A pool range was named after him, and pools were sold by "Buster Crabbe Dealers" throughout the eastern seaboard and southern states from 1952 until 1990. By the late 1960s Buster Crabbe "Cascade" pools were available in more than 28 countries worldwide. Buster remained a spokesman for Cascade until his death. The "Cascade Pools" name is still in operation in the US, UK and New Zealand and one US pool company in Missouri is called "Buster Crabbe Pools" while an above-ground pool supplier "Aqua Sports" markets the Buster Crabbe range, so Buster's name lives on in the world of recreational swimming. Though he followed other pursuits, he never stopped acting.

From the 1950s forward he appeared in numerous lower budget films. In 1980, he played "Colonel Gordon" in the Buck Rogers television series, with Gil Gerard. In this, on the way into battle behind the controls of a star fighter, he traded quips with Gerard, telling him that he had been doing this since before Rogers was born. "You think so, Colonel?" Rogers says. "Young man, I know so." He was right on all counts.

He appeared in the 1982 feature film, The Comeback Trail one year before his death. Crabbe also appeared in television commercials for Hormel Chili, Icy Hot, and the Magic Mold Bodyshirt, an upper body male girdle of sorts, which purportedly helped in weight loss. Through Icy Hot, he was actively involved in arthritis education. Despite his numerous film and television appearances, he is best remembered today as one of the original action heroes of 1930s and 1940s cinema. In the '50s, two comic book series were published named after him. Eastern Color published 12 issues of Buster Crabbe Comics from 1951–53, followed by Lev Gleason's The Amazing Adventures of Buster Crabbe for four issues in 1954. He died on April 23, 1983 of a heart attack after tripping over a wastebasket in his Scottsdale, Arizona home.