 The painter and League president Gifford Beal, recognizing Crosby's talent, invited him to spend the summer in Cape Cod, where Crosby made the acquaintance of Edwin Dickinson, Edward Hopper, Eugene O'Neill and other habitues of the Provincetown, Massachusetts artists colony.Back in New York, he fell in love with fellow League student Gertrude Volz, the artist-sculptor daughter of a well-to-do real-estate broker.After being commissioned a second lieutenant in the Officer Reserve Corps in 1916 and being called to active service the following year, serving for a time as a jiujitsu instructor, he and Volz eloped and were married at the training camp in Plattsburgh, New York, on July 7, 1917.