Chapter 1: an ugly place
Brady Huggett: Chapter 1: an ugly place
Stan Crooke told me something once that I’ve never forgotten. This was back in 2015, when I was interviewing him in a Hilton hotel, in San Francisco near Union Square. Stan was 69 years old then, gray hair, maybe a little less than 6 feet tall. His voice, then and now, has a pinched tone to it at times, which he attributes to allergies and “an Indiana nasal twang.” He has a damaged ring finger on his right hand, the middle joint dislocated so many times playing basketball in his youth that the top half juts at an angle. He is forthright, sometimes sharp in tone, but he also laughs easily, and he can be very funny. He was in San Francisco to attend a biotech conference, as CEO of a company he founded in 1989.
Stan grew up destitute, in downtown Indianapolis in the ’40s and ’50s. An “ugly place,” as he called it, and as we talked I asked him how he managed to overcome that neighborhood and his hard upbringing and get himself to college, and then beyond.
Stan Crooke: So, mostly desperation, and anger. And just the whole idea of having no hope, no aspirations. I mean, poverty is not the loss of money — though of course that’s sad. It’s the loss of dreams, it’s the absence of hope. That’s poverty.
Brady Huggett: The absence of a real future.
Stan Crooke: Beyond that. At least from my perspective, it’s the inability to even dream, you know?
Brady Huggett: His comment stuck with me because I immediately knew it was a truth. Poverty is ruinous not because it prevents buying new clothes, or having enough to eat. Those things are damaging in their own way, but poverty is ruinous because it stifles the ability to dream, as he said. It limits one’s vision of the future, and keeps it small.
And so it is remarkable to me that Stan Crooke, who came from a background unique among scientific researchers, certainly unique in the biotechnology industry, was able to not only dream of a better life for himself, but to actually achieve it. And it is even more remarkable that in doing so, he became a champion for a brand new drug modality, keeping the technology afloat through decades of laboratory and marketplace failures. Until, finally, his company won approval for a drug that would provide hope and dreams for thousands of terminally ill kids.
This is the story of Stan Crooke’s life. It’s the story of the biotech company he founded, and it’s the story of a powerful drug discovery technology called antisense. Together, they cracked the degenerative disease known as spinal muscular atrophy, which had been stealing the lives of children, and traumatizing families since it was first discovered more than a century ago.
From Nature Biotechnology, I’m Brady Huggett, and this is Hope Lies in Dreams.
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Brady Huggett: Stan Crooke was born in Indianapolis in 1945. He’d always been told his birthday was March 28, but when he went in search of a birth certificate as an adult, the one he found in the Marion County records had been filed years after he was born, and it listed March 26. So he’s not entirely sure of the day, or possibly even the year, but either way, he thinks his life began near the end of March in 1945.
His family history is similarly cloudy, but he heard that his mother’s lineage — the Carley name — runs mostly through Indianapolis, except for a period of time when the family moved to Kansas only to be turned back by the Dust Bowl. What he does know is that his mother grew up during the Great Depression in a struggling family. And he knows that she gave birth to him when she was around 15 years old, though to this day he does not know who his father is or where, exactly, he was born.
After his birth, his mother promptly left him with his grandmother and great grandmother, and he spent the first year of his life with them, squatting in a tar paper shack on the edge of the grounds of the Republic Creosoting Company in Indianapolis, alongside a railway line on the Southwest side of the city. Then they moved about 4 miles east, to 363 Terrace Avenue, into a tiny shotgun house, just over 500 square feet. Their blue collar neighborhood was less than two miles south of the heart of downtown, where tourists would come to take pictures of Indy’s iconic Soldiers and Sailors monument, but it must have felt much farther. The homes were valued at as little as $1,000 and could be rented for $20 or $30 a month. The men here were truck drivers, machinists, dock hands, bartenders, and the women mostly did not work outside the home. I asked Nelson Price, an Indianapolis historian, about the area at that time.
Nelson Price: That would have been the South Side. And it would have been a very hardscrabble area. A lot of Appalachian white families, not ethnically diverse, there would have been very few African Americans living there. There would have been no ethnic presence — the city at that point as a whole didn’t have an immigrant population. We weren’t a sea port, we were primarily a German heritage city. Those immigrants had come many generations before, so the city was pretty much either white or Black. And that would have been a very tough neighborhood to grow up in. Hardscrabble, working-class neighborhood. With the expectation that those kids are probably not going to grow up and go to college.
Brady Huggett: Their new place had a living room that was maybe 8 feet by 12 feet. The house had a toilet but no tub, and the family washed up in the sink. Two of Stan’s cousins, a boy and a girl, lived with him there, and together the kids slept on the floor. It was a difficult, tenuous existence, not a book to be found in the little house, and not much happiness either, his grandmother and great grandmother seemingly always tired, emotionless.
Stan Crooke: It just, I mean you just didn’t say nice things. Uh, there were no nice things to say, really. I mean we were scrabbling around, trying to have enough money to eat, and they’d been doing that for a lifetime.
Brady Huggett: Yeah.
Stan Crooke: And they were just beaten down. And, so — but they weren’t bad people. They were not mean. And they both liked one thing, and that was baseball.
Brady Huggett: Both your grandmother and great grandmother?
Stan Crooke: Oh, they loved it. We didn’t have a TV, but they had a radio, and they’d listen to the Indianapolis Indians baseball team — it was the Triple A baseball team. And so, you know, very quickly I learned to love baseball. And that was the one joy they had. At night they’d sit — the living room was big enough for two rockers and this one little couch, and then the heater. And they’d sit in their rockers and listen to the radio broadcast of the Indianapolis Indians. As did I.
Brady Huggett: When Stan was around 5, his mother came to claim him. She’d married a man, changing her last name from Carley to Crooke, and Stan began spending time with them, first in one place and then another, the second home a duplex of sorts located near the women’s prison, in the near East Side of Indianapolis. This neighborhood was maybe a little bit better, and there was a higher percentage of African Americans than his old neighborhood, but regardless, the differences were slight — it was still working class, still a tough place, the Blacks and the whites living separately. Stan moved in with his mother and began adjusting to his new life.
Stan Crooke: As I told you, my stepfather was a really good guy. I mean, a really nice man. You know, just a hard-working mechanic, who was great at his craft and who worked two jobs to try and make things go. And my mom had lots of needs, of course, and stuff.
Brady Huggett: The “lots of needs” Stan is referring to is partially about prescription drugs. His mother was an addict, using amphetamines and barbiturates, he said, and later she also had rheumatoid arthritis, and took a lot of cortisone. That meant she was a kind of “test case” he said, for all the toxicities related to steroids. On top of all that, she wasn’t happy with her life either, and she showed it.
Stan Crooke: And she was a hater. She hated people who had Cadillacs because they were rich. She hated people who had Lincolns because they were pretending to be rich. She hated people in the neighborhood because they were poor. Uh, she hated people from Kentucky and Tennessee because they were coming up and taking our jobs from ‘good Hoosiers.’ Hate came quite naturally. She was one of the great haters of our time.
Brady Huggett: That included across racial lines. Though being racist didn’t make her unique for the neighborhood, the state or the times.
Stan Crooke: Oh yeah, everybody was. I mean, it was just a, it was just a fact of life. I think I mentioned Crispus Attucks, the school.
Brady Huggett: Yeah.
Stan Crooke: I don’t have many memories, but I have a stark memory of one of the rare gatherings or more than — maybe three or four people, I can’t remember — sitting around watching the basketball. And everybody hating Crispus Attucks because they were Black.
Brady Huggett: Crispus Attucks, the all-Black high school named after the Black patriot killed in the Boston Massacre of 1770. In 1955, led by the great Oscar Robertson, Crispus Attucks won the state championship — the first time an all-Black school had done this in Indiana, or any other state in the nation. Stan was 10 years old at the time, and while he wouldn’t go so far as to say he had a “moral epiphany” while watching the game, he admits he was enthralled by the team, and the shocking talent of Oscar Robertson, and he remembers thinking he didn’t see “any reason to hate them.”
The Crispus Attucks victory won over a lot of people in Indianapolis — but drew out the hate in many, many others. And this was true in Stan’s neighborhood, which had plenty of hostility.
Stan Crooke: You know, where I grew up, the next poorest always hate the poorest, and we had a lot of Tennesseans and Kentuckians, and then ‘Hoosiers,’ and the whole environment was hate filled. I mean, it just was.
Brady Huggett: Yeah, there’s that sort of scrabble at the bottom.
Stan Crooke: Uh-hm. Everybody fighting for scraps. And hating each other for having a scrap.
Brady Huggett: And Stan’s mother, in particular, seemed filled with an anger that constantly leaked out.
Stan Crooke: The earliest memory I have, at home, with her, was the first bath she gave me. She had these long red fingernails, and she was cleaning my hair, ostensibly. And my scalp started bleeding and I watched blood in the water. I mean, that’s a bad memory.
Brady Huggett: Stan would spend weekends with his cousins and his grandmother and great grandmother in that shotgun house until he was 9 or so, but the rest of the time he was with his mother. He never went to kindergarten, but he taught himself to read, from the scraps of comic books he’d pick up on the streets, so he was fairly prepared when his mother got him into grade school early. She needed a babysitter for him, because she had started a family with Stan’s stepfather, giving birth to his half sister and brother.
He got a morning paper route when he was somewhere between 8 and 10 — he can’t quite remember the year now. Waking up, and leaving the house in the dark, collecting his papers, distributing them to homes around the neighborhood. When he was finished, the sky still black, he’d buy a doughnut at a nearby bakery just as it opened — a kind of reward for himself. Then returning to his own house, and his bed, sometimes able to fall back asleep before school, sometimes not.
The paper route was seven days a week, and the money went to his mother, to help pay for her rheumatoid arthritis medication. “I just was tired all the time,” he told me, but this pattern helped form in Stan a work ethic he’d carry the rest of his life.
Somewhere, amidst all this, he was moved up a grade because he was overachieving. Then in the 4th grade he was put in with the advanced kids, classmates he called “brainiacs” at the time. But he was such a “punk” he says, he was thrown out of it — a great chance ruined. Stan knew he was smart, but was too angry and too arrogant, too mouthy and too sure that these people couldn’t teach him anything, to get much out of school. He was constantly self sabotaging in this way. Just in general, he seemed to be careening through a childhood devoid of affection and without support.
But that’s the thing about Stan, and it’s one of his defining characteristics. He will not be a victim. He’s willing to hint at the stories of his past, especially now that he’s older, and admit he has some bad memories of that time. But he will not be pitied, and he’s always aware, always conscious that there are many others who have been through more than he has.
Stan Crooke: You know, there was a lot of, there was abuse that was not constant, not, not — my mother was easily annoyed and volatile. She was just physical. Whatever she had near you, she’d hit you with. Well, that tends to make you a little anxious. You know, because you don’t know when you’re gonna, when it’s going to go. But it’s not like somebody deliberately set out to destroy me, like other abusers. And there was nobody in my family — my family wasn’t — there are many families poorer. There were no hardened drug users, with, you know, the one exception.
Brady Huggett: Your mother.
Stan Crooke: Yeah. And there were no, um, criminals. No repeat offenders. And I was surrounded by people who had it much worse. But, there was no joy. There was no aspiration. For reasons that make no sense, all those little moments that you celebrate, I didn’t experience. You know, really, I don’t remember a single time I was told, We love you. I don’t remember anyone putting their arm around me. I don’t remember getting a gift, Christmas or birthday or anything like that.
Brady: But I don’t think everyone is as forgiving as Stan is. I spoke with Evan Crooke, Stan’s son, about his father’s upbringing, and that side of Evan’s family. Evan has a smile a lot like his dad’s, and sounds a little like him, too. He works in the independent film industry, running a distribution company. This is what he had to say about Stan’s family.
Evan Crooke: His mom particularly was, from what I know, really, really bad. I mean really bad. And, I remember watching, uh, the movie Mommy Dearest, which is based on a true story, you know, about an actress who basically got abused by her mom, and who was abusive and so on. My dad’s a very strong guy, emotionally, so I don’t remember too many times where he actually, um, visibly broke down and was upset. And watching the movie, I remember him having to get up and walk out. I mean, he was upset, clearly. Later I learned that his mom did some pretty terrible things. Awful people, really not good.
Brady Huggett: The grandmother and great grandmother too?
Evan Crooke: No, from what I know the grandmother was decent, and if she wasn’t it would have been a lot worse. But he started a newspaper route that he was trying to earn a buck, if you will, at 8 years old, and all that money went to the family. So I think that’s where that came in, that he had a responsibility to take care of his brothers and family and his mom, financially at 8 years old. It’s insanity.
Brady Huggett: He said his stepfather was a pretty decent fellow, in the end.
Evan Crooke: Yeah, I never met — you know what? I never met any of them. Uh, I wanted to, before I learned more in depth about them. And I remember him telling me that, uh, I don’t think you would like them. [laughs]
Brady Huggett: To clarify Evan’s comments, Stan had only one half brother, and his half sister. Anyway, some of this environment was caused by poverty. The stress and anxiety of it, the precarious nature of not having enough money. One summer, Stan spent the entire school break indoors, babysitting his half-siblings. The blinds pulled low, out of worry that social services might realize two young children were being left in the care of another child. These are the things that have to happen when there’s no money for child care, as Stan well knows. But it didn’t make it any easier at the time, for a boy who longed to be outside, playing ball.
The bottom line is that Stan did not have a great mother, and if she loved him at all, she was not good about showing it. And it’s safe to say he struggled to love her in return.
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Brady Huggett: When Stan was 11 or maybe 12, he got a job in a corner drugstore — another formative moment for him. It was called The Tech Corner, located across from Arsenal Tech, a trade high school on the near eastside of Indianapolis. Stan enjoyed the work. He liked the routine of it, he liked the praise he received for doing a task well, and he liked the money, too — though, like with his paper route, that money went to help the family.
He started high school around age 12, at Arsenal Tech — young, but his mother had put him in grade school early, and he’d also skipped a grade. Tech is a big, looming place with thousands of kids, and I asked Nelson Price, the historian, about what it might be like for a 12 year old to be on that campus.
Nelson Price: Tech would be an intimidating place for someone at 12. And even beyond that, it wasn’t the largest high school in the country, but it was still an extremely large high school, at that point, with separate buildings, and in his case, older kids who probably had their own turf. I think you would have encountered a lot of challenges with acceptance there.
Brady Huggett: Stan remembers it a lot like Nelson describes it. The school was maybe 75% white kids, and 25% Black when he was there, with the Black population rising, Nelson Price told me. Either way, almost all the kids were from working-class families, and it was a tough, mean place.
Stan Crooke: And then, I went to Tech, which was a big, very violent place. It looked just like the women’s prison. And it was violent, and I was little. And aggressive.
Brady Huggett: So you’re young, younger than everyone else.
Stan Crooke: Young, little.
Brady Huggett: Young, little and aggressive.
Stan Crooke: And too stupid to keep my mouth shut, so naturally I got beat up a lot. I’ll give you an example of the things that went on. I know this stuff sounds unbelievable, but one of the games that was played on the campus was, You’d put a quarter in front of you and stand there. And that became an invitation for someone to come up and take the quarter, and then there’d be a fight.
Brady Huggett: Yeah.
Stan Crooke: And one day, this giant, big guy laid a dollar on the ground, which was a lot. I didn’t — I was just coming from class and I noticed the dollar on the ground. I thought, Holy Cow, it’s a dollar! I picked it up, took it, walked away. And I was just heading into the next building, getting ready to go up the stairs, and this giant hand clamped around my neck, lifted me up on the wall. [laughs] I won’t say the words he called me. And he said, You took my dollar. And I said, Oooh, oh, I didn’t know it was your dollar. I gave it back to him. If I hadn’t given it back to him I think I’d of been a dead guy about then.
Brady Huggett: Yeah.
Stan Crooke: I mean, that stuff, that’s what went on. It was the sort of stuff that happens, at least in those days, in inner-city schools.
Brady Huggett: He’s spending time in that school, and also working at The Tech Corner, which was filled with the same kind of crowd, students coming in between classes and after school let out.
Stan Crooke: I mean, The Tech Corner, there was a gang that could, you know, the folklore was that they could take the motor out of a car in 30 minutes in the dark. They made their living doing that. And there were lots of — it’s not like it is today. Drugs were not a big business. There were no guns. So it was so much easier. You know, if the business of drugs were available for me in those days, I’d have probably done it because it was entrepreneurial and it was a way to make money. And for sure, if I’d had access to a gun there was somebody I would have killed, because you get tired of getting beaten up.
Brady Huggett: Yep.
Stan Crooke: But it’s nothing like as bad as life today is, in those environments. And so, sure, you can get beaten up, but you can survive getting beaten up. You can’t survive getting shot. And of course it was violent in the sort of capricious way violence is. You know, it just comes out of the blue.
Brady Huggett: And by now, all that violence he just mentioned, and the constant threat of it, and the crime and the people he was hanging around with, had influenced him, too.
Stan Crooke: And, I got arrested, because my buddies and I were stealing stuff out of cars because we were too small to steal them.
Brady Huggett: So you would just break the window and take whatever was in there.
Stan Crooke: Yeah, yeah.
Brady Huggett: How old were you then?
Stan Crooke: 12?
Brady Huggett: So they put you in, like a —
Stan Crooke: Juvie.
Brady Huggett: Juvie, yeah.
Stan Crooke: Just one night. But that was enough. First of all, I had to sit in the house of the people who caught me. For about an hour, waiting on the cops. It was so humiliating, I felt so terrible.
Brady Huggett: I bet.
Stan Crooke: These were just poor people, and I was stealing from them? I felt awful. So that humiliation was really good for me. And then I was scared. [laughs] I was in this cell with guys who were hardened.
Brady Huggett: [laughs] Like 35 years old.
Stan Crooke: They were 17, but my god they were big, and they were mean. And a big-time terror fixed me of my hoodlum ways. I said no thanks.
Brady Huggett: All right, so that was kind of the end of that?
Stan Crooke: The humiliation really mattered.
Brady Huggett: Yeah.
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Brady Huggett: Eventually he left The Tech Corner, and took a job at Rodenbeck Pharmacy, on East Michigan Street, about 7 blocks from the high school. He liked this place better. Working-class folks came in after the job, bought their booze, drank it on the sidewalk or street, talking to each other in the growing dusk, and then going home. It was less chaotic, more community, but still, the arrest and night in juvenile detention had solidified what Stan already knew about himself — that he wanted to get out of that neighborhood, that he wanted a different life than the one he’d been shown. That meant going to college. If he didn’t, he’d end up like everyone else he knew, meeting the same violent end that they were meeting. Like what happened to Rex Curtis.
Stan Crooke: You know, Rex Curtis, who got a full scholarship to Columbia when he was 17, he had acquired a new stepfather. And um, um. And he wanted the car, and his stepfather said no. And they lived next to A&P grocery store, so they parked their car over there in the far end of the lot on 10th Street in Indianapolis. I think it was 10th Street. And, um, so Rex was going to go take the car and his stepfather knew he was, and he was drunk and he waited for him in the backseat. And when Rex opened the door, he blew his head — blew his brains out with a shotgun.
Brady Huggett: He shot his — it was his stepson?
Stan Crooke: Yeah. And I happened to be going by there, it was about 10 at night, and actually saw Rex dead on the porch of this house, where he’d run to to try to find help. All kinds of things like that happened.
Brady Huggett: So he got shot, stumbled off and died?
Stan Crooke: Yeah. Uh-huh. And I had another friend, a car fell on him when they were working on it. And another who got shot. I mean, that’s what happens if you, if you’re just unlucky or if you continue in those kinds of activities.
Brady Huggett: All of this — the people he hung around, the people who had more than he did, the rich people who had it easier, the people who were bigger and meaner than he was that pushed him around, the mother who hit him, who didn’t show him any affection — he took all this in, and it began to form something hard inside of him.
Stan Crooke: But mostly what got me was the feeling of powerlessness. And how unfair the whole damn thing seemed to me. And it made me furious.
Brady Huggett: And that fury becomes its own kind of fuel for Stan. Anger can be a powerful motivator if it’s pointed in the right direction, and Stan was starting to figure out which direction he needed to point his. That anger would help him, would give him drive. And then, almost to his surprise, given his terrible relationship with his mother, he got another kind of help — from a female.
Stan Crooke: I don’t. I mean, I honestly don’t know what would have happened to me if I hadn’t met Nancy.
Brady Huggett: Kids came into Rodenbeck’s pharmacy on their way home from school, to get a soda or some candy. And in that group was a blonde, green eyed, pretty teenager named Nancy Alder, who lived in the neighborhood. Her own home life was bad — her father was a mean drunk, who hit her mother. Nancy was a couple of years younger than Stan, but eventually he realized she was coming into the pharmacy to talk to him, and they began to form a bond. She was nice to him, supported him, showed him what love was. These two had an almost singular focus, which was to pull themselves out of the chaos of their families and get out of the lives they were leading. They were both smart, and driven, and believed in each other. And eventually, with Nancy helping him with the application, Stan took aim at college.
Stan Crooke: I filled out one application for college, which was for Purdue. And I went into aeronautical engineering because it was a four-year course, and I liked airplanes, I thought, and because I thought smart people were engineers. I’d never met an engineer, I didn’t know what an engineer was.
Brady Huggett: But when you say that statement — that you thought that was what smart people did — it tells me that you wanted to be a smart person. In fact, that you knew that you were, you just wanted access to that life.
Stan Crooke: Yeah. Uh, it was very obvious to me that I was smart. I mean, I got told it, you know, when I got put in the special classes. But, I mean, older people would come into the drugstore all the time and ask me questions about history and literature and stuff. I just knew stuff.
Brady Huggett: Yeah.
Stan Crooke: And taking tests. I never met a test I couldn’t ace.
Brady Huggett: “I never met a test I couldn’t ace.” It must have been true for the SAT, because his grades weren’t going to get him into college, and somehow he got accepted into Purdue, into the aeronautical engineering program. Stan graduated from Tech in 1960 at age 16 — the first person in his family to earn a high school degree.
We are products of our environment, for sure. Though also, in some ways, our core is formed at birth. Stan likes to refer to himself as a “recombinational event” — the mix of his genes and his upbringing. He told me this little anecdote once, almost as an aside, and it was such a great image I felt I could immediately see what he’d been like as a boy, see his true essence.
Stan Crooke: Um, I was born happy. You know, when I was young, I’d have these what I’d call ‘light days.’ When I’d just wake up feeling so good. It took me some time to learn that I drove people crazy. Just, I was so happy.
Brady Huggett: Light days. That was Stan Crooke as a boy, waking up to another day, feeling like he was filled with light, an exuberance spilling out of him, annoying his mother, his grandmother. But the world does change us, Stan’s right. And he changed as he grew. He became this mix, this recombinational event. He built an angry shell around himself, but underneath he was still that hopeful kid waking up to a “light day.” Stan has a compassionate, empathetic soul — it’s the reason he couldn’t make it as a thief. It’s true he was also scared by his night in juvenile detention, but looking at the family he had just stolen from humanized them, he could see the real-life repercussions of his actions, could see that they were as poor as he was, and he didn’t have the stomach for that.
What he wanted was to leave town and never look back. He wanted an amnesia for all that happened to him in his life. He wanted to take Nancy’s hand, climb up to where the smart people were, and never think about his past again. Here’s Rick Hellman, who has been friends with Stan for nearly 50 years. Rick grew up in Chicago, and met Stan in medical school.
Rick Hellman: He didn’t, um, exhibit what I’d call angry-world phenomenon. But he’d talk about those things sometimes. But he didn’t like to talk about them. It’s sort of like, I guess it’s analogous to Holocaust survivors. When I grew up, I grew up in a neighborhood, people spoke German and Yiddish, and when you went to the foodstore, you saw a lot of people who had numbers, tattoos on the arms. Nobody talked about the Holocaust in the ’50s. Period. Or, I have an uncle, who it turned out was a war hero. And he was involved in World War II, and won the Silver Star and what have you. He never talked about the war, until the end of his life. Because it was so horrible. Um, I think that happens to some people. They did it. But now they are in another place.
Brady Huggett: Another place. That was exactly what Stan wanted. And now he had a chance, because he’d been accepted to Purdue. He was going to make something of himself after all. He was about to begin what would be a twisting road through higher education.
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Thank you, now and always, to Stan Crooke. Thank you to Nelson Price, Indianapolis historian and author, for sharing his great knowledge of his city. Thanks to Rick Hellman, for his time and his insight. And thanks to Evan Crooke, for talking about his father.
Sound mix and original theme by Brian Flood. All art by Erin Dewalt. Hope Lies in Dreams was written and produced by me, Brady Huggett. Go to the homepage of Nature Biotechnology to find the landing page for this podcast, which includes a list of sources, historical photos and a transcript of this chapter. Chapter two will be out in a week. Until then.