JOHN CREAN: 1925-2007:

John Crean, who made a fortune in the motor home business and gave away millions to public causes and institutions, died Thursday of congestive heart failure. He was 81.

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In Newport Beach, where he lived for many years and owned two homes, Crean was well known for his generosity, his irreverent sense of humor, and a cable TV cooking show he hosted.

That’s how Barbara Venezia met Crean in 1990. She called him to do a last-minute interview for her cable TV show on entrepreneurs. He mentioned he’d like to do a cooking show, and Venezia said she’d think about producing it.

A few weeks later, he invited her to his house.

“He’d actually built the set in the garage,” Venezia remembered. “He said, ‘Come back in a couple of days, and we’ll do something with it.’ ”

AN EYE FOR INNOVATION

Crean was born on a farm in North Dakota, and as a child during the Depression, he moved with his family to Compton. He was kicked out of two junior high schools and later dropped out of high school to join the Navy, but that never stood in the way of his business success.

He was always an innovator, and that was the secret of his success in business, longtime friend Tom Fuentes said.

“There’s no question in my mind that John was a genius in his own right,” Fuentes said. “He could see things in design and innovation that would be overlooked by anyone else.”

Fuentes bought some of Crean’s used cars, and he’d find little additions — a glove box and cup holder made of wood, for example — that Crean would install.

He brought his innovative mind to business, founding Fleetwood Enterprises in 1950 in Riverside. Initially the company built travel trailers, and it later created manufactured homes and motor homes, becoming at times the world’s largest manufacturer of each, said Lyle Larkin, Fleetwood’s vice president.

Crean was “a person who made things happen,” and he valued loyalty highly among his employees, Larkin said.

The company Crean started with a handful of people was worth $2.4 billion in the last fiscal year. But Crean left in 1998, when other company leaders wanted to change Fleetwood’s direction and bought out their founder’s interest in the business.

‘THE STUFF LEGENDS WERE MADE OF’

Several friends said you’d never know to meet Crean that he was fabulously wealthy and headed a Fortune 500 company.

“He once said to me, ‘Offices, I can’t understand what people do in offices,’ in terms of running a company,” Fuentes said. “Because for him, the company was the manufacturing, was people producing, was people working — not people sitting around pushing papers behind mahogany desks.”

Buck Johns, Crean’s neighbor and fellow Orange County Fair board member, said Crean’s success was the “stuff legends were made of.” He started with very little and ended up winning the Horatio Alger award, given to people who have overcome great odds to succeed.

“He had a million plaques … but he was really proud of the Horatio Alger award,” Johns said.

His personal endeavors seemed blessed as well. He was married to Donna Crean for 58 years, and their union seemed to be a real partnership, said former California Assemblywoman Marian Bergeson, a friend of the Creans for more than two decades.

“When they were talking about the library named in his honor, he wanted to make sure Donna’s name was first,” Bergeson said.

UNASSUMING AND WITTY

The cooking show, “At Home on the Range,” ran from 1992 to 1998, and when it ended, thousands of fans were on the waiting list to be in the audience during taping, Venezia said.

Neither Crean nor Venezia was much of a cook, and Crean set fire to some paper towels during their first trial run — in fact, that’s how the show got its name. Venezia remembered former Rat Packer Joey Bishop was watching their antics and said, “Neither one of you are at home on that range.”

Crean was a simple man who loved cooking, Venezia said. “He wasn’t very good at it, but that did not stop him, and he used to say to me that 99% of success is just showing up,” she said.

Friends said Crean was unassuming. Michael Nason, a spokesman for Crystal Cathedral Pastor Robert H. Schuller, said the first time he and Crean went to lunch, he was expecting the fancy fare at the Balboa Bay Club or some other classy place — but Crean wanted to go to Denny’s.

“He had the air of a very experienced person in life who had lived life fully and learned from it and wasn’t afraid to share with you his lessons,” Orange County Fair President Becky Bailey-Findley, who knew Crean from his service on the fair board from 1991 to 1999.

As a board member, Crean was called to testify in a lawsuit over the Pacific Amphitheater. When he was called to testify in the trial, Bailey-Findley remembered, he was asked about how he got on the board and why the governor had appointed him.

Then he was asked, “ ‘Why did you want to be on the fair board?’ and he said, ‘Because I really like hot dogs,’ ” Bailey-Findley said.

That sense of humor and irreverence was a big part of Crean’s attitude toward life. Bailey-Findley said when fair board and staff members would worry about their public image, Crean would reply, “Don’t worry what they write about you in the newspaper today, because they wrap fish with the paper tomorrow.”

Crean is survived by his wife, Donna; their four children, Andy, Johnnie, Emily and Susie; and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The time of services at the Crystal Cathedral will be announced later.