Nov. 10, 1936 – Jan. 14, 2025
The Rev. Crawford Long Sachs – a retired vocational deacon from All Saints Episcopal Church in Oxnard and a former engineer in the U.S. Air Force – died Jan. 14 at age 88.
Survivors include his wife of 45 years, Rowena Butler Sachs; his children Sidney Helen Sachs, Mathew Morgan Sachs, and Karen Elizabeth Echternacht; stepson Daniel Gregory Paladini; and 17 grandchildren and great grandchildren.
A graveside service will be held at 2 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 30, at Conejo Mountain Memorial Park in Camarillo with the Very Rev. Melissa Campbell-Langdell, rector of All Saints, Oxnard, and dean of Deanery 1, officiating. Deacon Kathy Moore will represent the diocesan community of deacons.
After discerning a call to the vocational diaconate to which he was ordained in 2000, Sachs served in chaplaincy ministry at St. John’s Regional Hospital in Oxnard and St. John’s Hospital in Camarillo for many years before retiring.
Sachs was born amid the Great Depression in Alexandria, Virginia, to William Partridge and Francis Partridge (née Long). The family later settled in Norris, Tennessee, where they became active in the local Episcopal Church.
Graduating from Oak Ridge High School, Sachs studied physics at the University of Tennessee before receiving his commission in the Tennessee State Militia as a second lieutenant. His military career – including the Air Force and National Guard – spanned more than two decades up to his retirement as a lieutenant colonel in 1985.
After marrying Edna Ruth Clack in 1960, Sachs taught high school for a time in Tennessee before moving to California in 1963 to pursue work as an engineer and later a project manager for the Naval Air Command. In 1969, he was awarded the Meritorious Civilian Service Medal from Admiral Zumwalt in support of the Market Time Air Barrier project which took him to Vietnam for six months during the war.
Sachs and Edna separated in 1976, and Edna with their three children returned to Tennessee.
In 1978, Crawford married Rowena Butler Paladini at All Saints Episcopal Church in Oxnard. The couple were active in the church community, later serving as members of the church vestry.
Sachs’s civil service career progressed into the 1990s as he became one of the senior program managers responsible for F14 Tomcat fighter computer systems. He drove projects to set software and hardware standards.
Sachs earned a master’s degree in the 1980s in business administration from Pepperdine University and then, after his civil service retirement in 1997, he returned again to his studies, this time with a focus on theology leading to his diaconal ordination in the Diocese of Los Angeles.