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Bruce Joseph Croushore (born August 26, 1947) is a retired American corporate lawyer. He worked as an associate attorney at the now-dissolved law firm Dewey Ballantine in New York City, as international counsel for Sterling Drug, also in New York City, and as General Counsel and Vice President at the Bender group of companies in Mobile, AL, Tampa, FL and New Orleans, LA. He was also Of Counsel in the Madison, WI law firm Axley Brynelson, LLP.
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Background
Croushore was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. His father, Don Chester Croushore, served in the Army Air Corps in World War II and remained in the military for his entire career, retiring as a Brigadier General of the US Air Force. The Croushore family were early settlers of southwestern Pennsylvania, having arrived from Holland in the 1730s. The spelling of the family name changed from Kraushaar in the 1830s. An ancestor, Col. Edward Cook, was an extensive landowner and built a stone house between 1772 and 1776 that remains occupied by descendants. Cook was a friend of George Washington, a member of the Provincial Congress and of the State Constitutional Convention.
Education
Croushore graduated from Franklin & Marshall College in 1969. There, he majored in Government and French, served on the Student Council and was President of his Sophomore class. He obtained his law degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1972 and his MBA from New York University in 1981. He spent his junior year in Tours, France and Paris as a member of the Sweet Briar College Junior Year in France group. He served as clerk to the Attorney General of Micronesia, formerly part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, in 1970.
Professional career
At Bender, Croushore was instrumental in obtaining DARPA research grants in modern shipbuilding techniques and processes, including the use of lasers to cut thick steel plate for vessel hulls. The grants were the first awarded to a commercial shipbuilder in the US. Croushore also negotiated the sale in London of a fishing fleet built by Bender to replace the fleet appropriated from Kuwait by the regime of Saddam Hussein. He served as President of the Shipbuilders Council of America from 2002 thru 2004. Croushore advised Bender in a joint venture with Austal, an aluminum shipbuilder headquartered in Perth, Australia, and was appointed Secretary of the JV, Austal USA, in 2004.
In 2009, he and other corporate officers were named individually in litigation brought by a purchaser of vessels being constructed by Bender in Mobile and Tampa. The lawsuit was dismissed for failure to state a claim, but its costs forced Bender into liquidation.
Other pursuits
An avid swimmer, Croushore’s stationary swimming apparatus was granted a US patent in 1998. In 2011 Croushore began a music series in Grace Episcopal Church on the Capital Square in downtown Madison, WI. The series, “Grace Presents”, has become a fixture in Madison’s music scene.
Personal life
Croushore married Michele Hilmes in 1978. Hilmes is Professor Emerita of the University of Wisconsin—Madison, where she taught media and cultural studies. Most of her research and publication has centered around media history, with an emphasis on radio and sound studies and on transnational media flows. Their daughter Amanda was born in 1980, and currently practices law in New York City. She was an associate lawyer in the firm Kaye Scholer for five years and is currently law clerk to Vincent L. Briccetti, a judge on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.