Like the twin-engine plane chartered for the late-night hop to his next gig, the career of pop singer Jim Croce had just begun to take off last September. Streaking to the top, his "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" established Croce as the mocking master of blue-collar blues-rock. Fate, however, did not heed the tongue-in-cheek menace of his earlier smash "You Don't Mess Around With Jim." The plane snagged in a treetop at the end of the dim runway outside Natchitoches, La., and sent 30 year old Jim and five others to their deaths. But in the few months since that tragedy Croce's career has undergone a posthumous lift off unmatched in music history.

Sales of Croce's year-and-a-half old first solo LP have tripled, and his two other albumsÑthe last of them prophetically titled I Got a Name and recorded a week before his deathÑhave also made sustained runs to the top of the charts. At this Saturday's Grammy ceremonies he is up for two awards, including "best male vocalist of the year."

Rock music fans traditionally have bade adieu to the prematurely dead by making gold of a star's last release or the inevitable "Best ofÉ" retrospective album. But in the case of Croce, whose early exposure had threatened to typecast him as one of the tough guys he sang about, the fans are belatedly discovering a new and gentler Jim in their acclaim for such whimsical and introspective sleepers as "Time In A Bottle."

Croce (pronounced CROW-chee) leaves a legacy greater than the three gold discs on a record executive's wall and the seven-figure royalties to his heirs. Behind the battered work shirts, the no-nonsense haircut and the nasal tenor of his music stood a man whose dues were paid in full. More than once the career he began by playing Villanova's fraternity row in the '60s dead-ended, and Croce signed up first for the Army, then as a ghetto schoolteacher ("my Albert Schweitzer period"). In 1970 he and his wife Ingrid flopped as a folk duo on the New York club circuit, and he returned to his native Pennsylvania as a truck driver to raise enough money to have a baby. Croce's son Adrian James celebrated his second birthday a week and a day after Jim died.

For Ingrid the loss is lessened only by feeling that Jim was somehow as braced for the final tragic irony as for any that had come before. On jukeboxes, radio and records around the world, Croce's "Time In A Bottle" stands as his own best epitaph: But there never seems to be enough time/ To do the things you want to do/ Once you find them/ I've looked around enough to know.

(Writer unknown, © 1974 People Magazine.)
 
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