Happy Crawford Day!

What's that? You've never heard of Crawford Day? It's hardly surprising, I suppose. It is a highly localized phenomenon exhibited but once a year. Crawford day is the memorial and honorary celebration of the actor named Broderick Crawford and more specifically his work in a tv program from the 50s called Highway Patrol.

In this show, Crawford played highway patrol chief Dan Mathews. Mathews was constantly driving his huge black-n-white Buick Police Special across the highway network of an unspecified western state and was always in radio contact with dispatch and his officers. Dozens of times each episode he could be heard to say, in response to those on the other end of the radio, "ten-four", the police code number for "message received and understood".

Highway Patrol was syndicated and re-run around the globe, but in most of it's syndicated forms it was re-titled "10-4" thus the tie to Mathew's best known tagline is reinforced. In fact, as "10-4", the show's opening sequence shows Mathews pulling around a corner onto the highway bellowing "I'm on my way, 10-4" into his radio mike.

Hopefully, it becomes clearer now why this, of all days, is Crawford Day. It's not clear? What is today's date in the format of mm-dd? 10/04... Aha 10-4! Crawford Day!

"Ok, ok," you say, "I get it, but where did the whole Crawford Day thing come from?" Evidently, for this is all second, even third or fourth hand to me, it was instituted years ago when the company I work for was part of McDonnel Douglas. A certain employee, Clark something, came up with the idea. It seems that it was not originally conceived out of a deep passion for Highway Patrol, or even Broderick Crawford, but as a convenient excuse to have some cake in the lunch room and goof off for a while. I suppose, as such, it must be deemed an enduring success, for as I type this I am still licking icing off my fingers from this year's Crawford Day cake.

"2150 return to headquarters"
"I'm on my way, 10-4"

NOTE: This page was updated on October 4, 2007 to fix linkrot. The the resource found at the original link called 'Highway Patrol' no longer exists. It has been replaced with something much better