Making a Name Writing to Editors

Bobby Crawford, 38, has been delivering mail at the Hearst Corporation for 13 years, regaling everyone from interns to executives with tales of his skateboarding escapades. But what most of the writers, editors and arbiters to whom he delivers letters and packages do not realize is that he has been published in more magazines than many of them. For the past 15 years, Crawford has been firing off handwritten letters to magazines — skateboard publications like Thrasher and Slap, culture and arts magazines like Interview and BlackBook, music magazines like Magnet. More than 100 of his letters have been printed in their pages, reports Abigail Pesta, editor at large of Marie Claire, a Hearst Corporation magazine.

He recently sent off a missive to Thrasher, complaining in his slightly backward-slanting print that snowboarding was “just another rip-off from skating.” Mop-haired and boyish, he usually signs his letters “Shaggy,” though he uses his real name for more serious topics, like a 2006 letter to BlackBook about how the day John Lennon died is not a day to celebrate.

“All the morons that go to Strawberry Fields playing his music, smoking dope and drinking alcohol are making his true fans (like myself) look bad,” Mr. Crawford wrote. (BlackBook ran the note, but pointed out that the article he had been commenting on was about a celebration of Lennon’s birth, not his death.)

In a letter to Slap in December 2007, Shaggy let loose on youth: “Kids these days are turning into fat, lazy slobs. They don’t know how to express themselves. People need to get off their computers, out of their houses, and meet some people in the streets.”

One of his main complaints was that people rarely write letters on paper anymore. Slap itself no longer appears on paper, in fact, having gone Web-only in December 2008. But in its final few months of paper publication, Slap put out a full-page appreciation of Shaggy. Next to a photo of one of Crawford’s crumpled, hand-addressed envelopes, an editor noted, “Shaggy has indeed been mailing us letters for at least a decade now, and they are always funny, mean, disturbing and good.”

“Shaggy was relentless,” Slap’s editor in chief, Mark Whiteley, said in an interview. “He’d send letters every month. Sometimes they were terrible, sometimes they were pointless, sometimes they were just too harsh to print. But a lot of the time they were hilarious. They were also incredibly ‘my way or the highway,’ which made them entertaining.”

Asked what inspired him to become a cantankerous letter writer, Crawford said he simply wrote what he saw. “I don’t get fooled,” he said. His favorite letters? The ones that make people angry.

When not writing letters, Mr. Crawford can often be found on his skateboard at Union Square Park or around Astor Place, sometimes until the wee hours. A favorite activity: jumping over “passed-out drunk people” on his skateboard. To prove it, he produced a photo of himself soaring over a man sprawled on the ground at Union Square.