Chapter I:
The Family History of Wallace E. Carroll

The backbone of the country is families. I’d like to see everyone out of the office in time to be home for dinner by six o’clock so that dinner can be had with the family, sharing in the day’s joys and frustrations and sibling arguments, all of which contribute to healthy ties. – Wallace E. Carroll (April 6, 1987)

Wallace Edward Carroll was born on November 4, 1907, in Taunton, Massachusetts. He was the son of an Irish immigrant blacksmith, Patrick Joseph Carroll, and grew up in Taunton when it was a city of 30,000, populated mostly by Irish immigrants.

Wallace would have a presence in each decade of the 20th century. He was born into a peaceful world. The pace was slower, and life was simpler, but dramatic changes would take place in each decade. He grew to young manhood in the second decade against the background of World War I. In the third decade, Wallace completed high school, college, and a year of business school. In the fourth decade he laid the foundations of a sixty-year business career. In the final decades of the 20th century, both business and academia honored the accomplishments of Wallace Carroll. His virtues of honor, tenacity, courage, loyalty, and charity, combined with a keen and farsighted intelligence, produced a life marked by achievement, which improved the lives of thousands of others. Wallace Carroll enjoyed learning about the Carroll family lineage1 in both Ireland and in the U.S. and in later years relished the opportunity to visit the land of his ancestors:

The countryside was all that has been described, stone walls, hedges, and green fields with fat cattle and sheep. No forests at all. The comforting smell of peat filled the air as we passed through the towns. Several were full of sheep and cattle for the fair and sale being held that day. We were at Athlone before we knew it, and the first man we asked knew my uncle Tom Carroll, in Ballymallalin, three or four miles away. We found the Carroll farm easily enough and were met at the door by Mary Carroll. She had seven sons and two daughters, all gone except one son, Danny, who stayed with his mother. Another son, Michael, was home from Rochester New York for a visit. His older brother, Paddy, emigrated to Rochester several years ago and is a plastering contractor, eventually bringing three of his brothers over. The plasterers earn $3.90 an hour in Rochester, quite a contrast to the life of a worker at 35 cents an hour had they stayed in Ireland, since the farm isn’t big enough to support more than one or two sons, one reason why my father and his sister emigrated around 1890.2

Patrick J. Carroll, Wallace’s father, set up his Blacksmith shop in Taunton, Massachusetts in 1903. It was called “P.J. Carroll Blacksmith,” and was located in a small wooden building with a historic legacy and where three generations of Carrolls practiced this art.3

Patrick was a hardworking man of 37 in 1907 when his youngest son Wallace was born. It had been 18 difficult years since he had arrived in Boston in 1889 at the age of 19, having left his family home in Ireland. His home was in the village of Ballymallalin. His father, Daniel Carroll, and his mother, Mary Malin, farmed 110 acres of rocky soil and raised livestock. Patrick left his home for America and arrived in Boston on the ship Iowa on June 25, 1889. The ship's manifest indicates that he was trained as a bricklayer in Ireland.4

Patrick first settled in Brockton, Massachusetts, then the best-known horseshoe manufacturing city in the country. A thriving racing track in Brockton demanded the skill of shoeing horses and Patrick began his career as an apprentice. Later he had his first blacksmith shop on Ford Street in Brockton. While visiting Taunton one spring day in 1893, Patrick Carroll bought a handkerchief at a store located on the corner of Trescott and Main streets. The saleswoman working at the store was Katherine Feely. Patrick began to court Miss Feely, biking 24 miles from Brockton and back each Saturday night. Wallace Carroll recalled his father telling him that part of the trip was through the Hockomock Swamp where mosquitos would eat him alive in the summer, and ice and snow were perilous in the winter.

Wallace Carroll’s mother, Katherine Louise (née Feely) Carroll was born in Boston on August 10, 1874. She was named after her mother, Katherine (née Brennan) Feely, who was born in Indiana and raised in Massachusetts. Wallace’s parents were married on November 27, 1895. They lived in Brockton for eight years. Three daughters were born in their Brockton home: Mildred Agnes (November 11, 1896), Mary Irene (January 20, 1899), and Helen Katherine (February 15, 1901). Wallace Carroll’s brother, Howard Brennan Carroll, was born on October 23, 1905. On November 4, 1907, two years after the birth of Howard, Wallace Carroll was born. He was the sixth and last child of Katherine Feely and Patrick J. Carroll.

In the early 1900s, many Irish immigrant families who owned their homes took in boarders to help with the expenses of owning property. The board usually amounted to only a few dollars a week, but the wise and frugal homeowners felt a sense of satisfaction with their savings. A few days after giving birth to her third son, Katherine Feely Carroll asked one of the Grove Street boarders, John D. Wallace, if she could name her son after him. He was delighted and the baby boy was baptized Wallace Edward Carroll at St. Mary’ Church three days after his birth.

In the early years of the new century, Katherine Feely Carroll worked long days raising six young children, keeping a beautiful home, and staying active in St. Mary’s Parish, the focus of the family’s social life. In 1908, the Carroll family moved from 10 Grove Street to 34 Trescott Street.5

Wallace Carroll adored his mother and respected the manner in which she raised her children and managed the household. He wrote of her:

As a boy, I did not think we were poor, although raising six children of which I was the youngest left little or no savings or luxuries from the earnings of an immigrant blacksmith which in those days were meager and very competitive. In the blacksmith shop, I’d earn pennies brushing flies off the horse on humid days while my father shod them, at an age probably about 6 to 8 years old. I never had to support my mother until later years, since she did pretty well herself to supplement the family income by having roomers in the house, plus raising us kids with none of the conveniences of today and living to age 84.

In the days when Wallace and his brothers and sisters were growing up, Patrick J. Carroll’s blacksmith shop was one of the busier and more prosperous of the seventeen operating in Taunton. In the 1916 Taunton Directory, under a listing of “blacksmiths, Horse Shoers and Carriage Smiths, most of the 17 smiths had Irish names, such as Brennan, Carey, Hanon, Lynch, and O’Connor. Patrick J. Carroll was a good husband, father, and provider. While he worked long and hard, and the Carrolls lived in relative comfort, he and his wife encouraged the children to earn their own spending money. Wallace, the youngest, was no exception and through observation and practice, he developed perhaps the most zealous work ethic and strongest competitive spirit of the six Carroll children.

Like his brothers and sisters, Wallace attended the Old School Street Grammar School. In 1916, as a fourth grader of 9 years, he delivered the Taunton Daily Gazette to a steady number of customers in the neighborhood. When he moved to the Cohannet School, he continued to work after school and on Saturdays at his paper route, and other jobs, later recalling:

We all worked before or after school, in my own case as a paperboy, establishing my own route, buying my own papers and collecting my own accounts, the profit on a 2 cents daily paper being 3 cents a week for six days’ delivery. Even in those days, it would seem that entrepreneurship and efficiency were evident, my route being concentrated in a narrow area so that the papers could be delivered fast to leave time to play a half hour or so of football before dark.

A regular portion of Wallace's free time was taken up by piano lessons and he progressed rapidly to the point where he could sight read most sheet music. When Wallace reached high school, he played as a lineman on the Taunton High School football team. He was always near the top of his class academically while continuing to earn his spending money and helping out at home. While a teenager at Taunton High School, he worked at Cushman’s, an ice cream store near the Taunton Green, noting:

It was assumed without question that we would work our way through college. I was the clerk in a clothing store in the afternoons and an ice cream factory in summer during high school. At Boston College, I was a section hand on the New Haven Railroad during the summer, and still clerked in spare time and Saturdays during the school year.

Wallace graduated from Taunton High School in June of 1924, at the age of 16. His brother, Howard, two years older and one year ahead of him in school, had gone to the Archdiocesan Seminary in Baltimore in September of 1923 to study for the priesthood. He made the decision to leave the seminary after one year and, together with Wallace, enrolled at Boston College, 45 miles away in Chestnut Hill, in September of 1924. By this time, Wallace and Howard’s older brother Frank was already a full-fledged blacksmith, working alongside...