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Bob Carroll, 90; Edgartown official owned restaurant, hotels

Bob Carroll.handout

On July 19, 1969, Bob Carroll was chairman of the Edgartown Board of Selectmen and owned a hotel in town that would become his longtime Martha’s Vineyard home. He also was a Democrat in a community that was then full of Republicans, and he owned a plane, which led the police chief to call him that day.

“He said, ‘Jesus, Bob, we’ve got a problem,’ ” Mr. Carroll recalled in an interview for “Last Lion,” the 2009 biography of US Senator Edward M. Kennedy that was written by Globe reporters and editors.

Hours earlier, in the middle of the night, Kennedy had left the scene of the fatal car accident on Chappaquiddick Island in which he was driving and Mary Jo Kopechne died. Mr. Carroll, who had campaigned for John F. Kennedy’s Senate and presidential bids, said he wanted to get Edward Kennedy “off the island before the press got here,” so he flew the senator from the Vineyard to Cape Cod.

In the “Last Lion” interview, he said Kennedy was “pretty quiet” during the brief flight across Nantucket Sound, and Mr. Carroll offered continued assistance as his passengers left: “I said when they got out, ‘It’s my town, Senator — call me.’ ”

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Though that day earned Mr. Carroll a place in Kennedy history, he was a dominant figure in Edgartown for decades, rising from digging ditches to owning a restaurant and hotels, serving as a county commissioner, and cofounding a newspaper. He even had a bit part in the movie “Jaws” when it filmed on the Vineyard. Mr. Carroll died in Martha’s Vineyard Hospital March 31 of complications from a fall. He was 90 and had lived in the penthouse of the Harbor View Hotel, which he formerly owned. He sold the hotel in 1986 with the provision that he be allowed to live in its penthouse until his death.

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Mr. Carroll started life in Edgartown with a less auspicious view. In a 2012 interview with the Vineyard Gazette, he spoke of “a ragamuffin” childhood. His father was a butcher in a market and his mother was a hotel chambermaid. The youngest of four siblings, Mr. Carroll grew up on South Summer Street in a place that rented for $4 a week, across the street from what then was the town poorhouse.

“It sounds funny but four bucks were damn hard to come by,” he told the Gazette in 2012. “This was in the early ’30s when guys were digging an opening through South Beach with shovels, and the town was paying for it but you could only get two days a week of work at 25 cents an hour.”

Mr. Carroll remembered such times with unsentimental clarity.

“He loved to say that the year-round people then were serfs for the summer people,” said his daughter Sue of Edgartown. “When people would say to him the Vineyard has changed so much, he would always say, ‘It’s changed for the better.’ He never forgot what it was like. I think a lot of people romanticized it, but he didn’t.”

After high school, Mr. Carroll joined the Army and served in the Pacific during World War II. Upon returning home, he attended Boston University on the GI Bill, sold cars, worked in commercial fishing, and “dug ditches for the water company when they used to dig them with a shovel,” his daughter said. He also “drank as therapy for a few years,” she added. Mr. Carroll would later say his life began to improve when, at 28, he traded alcohol for sobriety.

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“I was a very bad alcoholic. I came from a long line of drunks. When my oldest daughter was born I kept falling out of bed and waking her up,” he told the Gazette in 2012, adding that “when I got sober I started to get respect. I found if I could stay sober I could do almost anything I wanted to do.”

Mr. Carroll also helped others stop drinking and “was responsible for the sobriety of a lot of people,” his daughter said. “He was sober for 62 years. He quit smoking years ago and he used to say, ‘You know, I always wanted another cigarette, but I never wanted another drink.’ ”

A couple of years before taking his final drink, he married Lucille Hillman, whom he met when commercial fishing took him to New Bedford, where she was attending nursing school. They had four daughters and their marriage ended in divorce.

Two other marriages, to Rebecca Welton and Edwina Brooke, also ended, his daughter said.

Mr. Carroll walked away from commercial fishing after a shipmate, struck by a piece of equipment, died in his arms, his daughter said. He bought a coffee shop, his first business, in the early 1950s. “We had guys who would pay 10 cents for a cup of coffee and sit there all morning so no one else could get in,” Mr. Carroll told the Gazette, “so I raised the price of coffee.”

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He went on to open the Seafood Shanty restaurant, and in 1965 he bought the Harbor View Hotel, later adding the Kelley House hotel to his holdings. In 1974, Mr. Carroll was stretched thin, “but then came financial salvation in the sort of windfall we expect only from Hollywood,” Nis Kildegaard wrote in “Harbor View: The Hotel That Saved a Town,” a 2014 book. “A young filmmaker named Steven Spielberg was planning to make a movie on Martha’s Vineyard. Its name was ‘Jaws.’ ”

The crew reserved 50 rooms and Mr. Carroll would later estimate that by the conclusion of filming, his various Vineyard businesses, which included a marine and a real estate firm, had collectively made more than $1 million off the production. Given a small role in “Jaws,” he played a selectman in Amity, the film’s fictional community, and collected residual checks after the movie opened in 1975.

“He just got a residual check recently,” said his daughter, who added that Mr. Carroll “actually had a speaking role that was left on the cutting room floor.”

A service has been held for Mr. Carroll, who in addition to his daughter Sue leaves three other daughters, Jane Joyce of Edgartown, Sarah Bray of Arcade, N.Y., and Mary Ellen Goodsir of Reading; and seven grandchildren.

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“One of his gifts is that he really liked people a lot,” his daughter Sue said. “He genuinely liked people and connected.”

Mr. Carroll was fond of Caribbean islands, building condos on Anguila and visiting St. Bart’s for years, but the Vineyard remained the island he called home.

In 1984, Mr. Carroll joined four others to found the Martha’s Vineyard Times. He also was a founder of Martha’s Vineyard Community Services, served on the board of Camp Jabberwocky, and was a trustee of Martha’s Vineyard Hospital and the Martha’s Vineyard Preservation Trust.

“I didn’t always want to do good things,” he said in the 2012 Gazette interview. “I haven’t been an angel. But I’ve had a good life.”


Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.