“Icontinue to be grateful for my Roosevelt scholarships and wanted to help other young musicians in the same way.”

After high school, he enrolled at Woodrow Wilson Junior College and started taking lessons from Renold Schilke at Central YMCA College, the precursor to Roosevelt University. Schilke, a renowned and accomplished performer, encouraged him to audition for the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the training orchestra for the Chicago Symphony. There, he was given a scholarship to study with Adolph Herseth. “His lessons were invaluable,” Crown said.

Crown then received a tuition scholarship his junior and senior year to Roosevelt University’s School of Music, now the Chicago College of Performing Arts, graduating in 1951 with a Bachelor of Music Education degree. He completed a master’s degree in the same subject in 1959 with plans that included teaching.

“I continue to be grateful for my Roosevelt scholarships and wanted to help other young musicians in the same way,” he said. Crown’s recent bequest established the Thomas and Donna Crown Scholarship to benefit a trumpet player and a trombone player each year. The planned gift is also named for his late wife, Donna, who was a trombonist. The couple spent 61 years together until her death last October. This gift is the couple’s lasting legacy to young Roosevelt musicians.

Grant Park Symphony and the Boston Pop

Crown’s first professional job was playing with the Grant Park Symphony Orchestra, which led to a tour with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops in 1953. Then WGN Radio-TV hired him as its orchestra’s first trumpet. Soon thereafter, Uncle Sam came calling.

Drafted into the Army in 1953, he was stationed near Stuttgart, Germany, and performed with the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra. “It was a defining period of my life,” he said. “We toured France, Italy and Great Britain, and played innumerable concerts in Germany. It was an exciting time. The exposure to other cultures and languages influenced the rest of my life.”

When his two-year Army stint ended, he returned to WGN and accompanied such luminaries as Tony Bennett and Ella Fitzgerald, among others. During that time, he started taking lessons from master performer Arnold Jacobs, the tubist of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, who taught brass instruments. It was Jacobs who introduced Crown to another of his students, Donna Frank, a young trombonist.

“Arnold did a little matchmaking, I think,” Crown said. “He scheduled our lessons one right after the other, so we’d be sure to meet. I asked her on a date to see the CSO, and two years later, we married on July 4, 1959.”

In 1964, Crown joined the Lyric Opera Orchestra and remained with them until his retirement 29 years later in 1993.

Over those years, under longtime principal conductor Bruno Bartoletti, Crown performed all the great operas, accompanying such stars as Luciano Pavarotti and Dame Joan Sutherland, among others. He recalls those days as incredibly busy. Like many musicians, he worked a number of jobs.

Somehow, he still had energy to spare, so, inspired by a piccolo-trumpet mute used by his teacher, friend and CSO principal trumpeter Adolph Herseth, Crown began experimenting with producing his own mutes.

“My first was a straight mute for the B-flat or C trumpet that was well received by professional trumpeters worldwide,” he said. In 1968, Crown, with the help of his wife, opened Crown Mutes, a company on the city’s Northwest Side that still produces mutes today.

As he reflects on a long and full life — filled with music, family, world travels, countless concerts and hours and hours of practicing, Crown is grateful. Grateful for his parents’ early support of his career choice, for the love of his wife, for his teachers’ time, for his Roosevelt education and for the life he’s been able to live, due in great part to his most prized possession, his trumpet.

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