His father, William Cromer (a longshoreman worker) and mother, Hattie Bell DeWalt, were born in Newberry, South Carolina.
As a teenager, Harold earned a role on Broadway in the 1939 Cole Porter musical, “Du Barry Was a Lady,” starring Ethel Merman, Bert Lahr, and Betty Grable.
Cromer appeared in other films over the years, including “The Cotton Club” in 1984 and Paper Soldiers, starring a young Kevin Hart, and produced by Jay Z. Harold Cromer, was widely known as Stumpy, half of the vaudevillian duo Stump and Stumpy, performing antic dance routines in clubs around the country after World War II and later on major America television networks.
Stump and Stumpy sang and danced, and clowned while performing skits with great precision, often to the music of jazz orchestras, frequently performing on the same bill with the likes of Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan.
They knew of what I took from their culture, which was their comedic sense of timing, their ability for self deprecating humor, which is everything I used... " about Lewis and Dean Martin's routine.
For years, Cromer introduced performers like Paul Anka, Bobby Darin, Bill Haley and His Comets, Aretha Franklin, Nat King, Cole, James Brown and even a young Stevie Wonder.