Walter Carr was a prime example of the intangible bond that exists between the Canadian Province of Ontario and the Northern Neck. As with my own grandfather, Walter was born in Ontario, and in his case after moving to Los Angeles and then to Rochester, New York, he found his way, through marriage, to the Northern Neck.
Walter readily assimilated to our local culture. His Toronto accent blended well with the way we speak, and he constantly worked to understand the Northern Neck and its people. He immersed himself in local lore and history, and with his late wife, Dorothy, he liked spending his free time visiting historic sites and gardens.
With respect to gardening, Dorothy, a native of Weems, was a “master gardener” before the title came into common parlance. In the course of their time here, the Carrs built two homes on empty lots, which Dorothy transformed into floral oases. Walter explained that growing up in the Depression, Dorothy found gardening as both her sport and her hobby.
In their last move, this time to Tappahannock, they bought a house on a lot, and Dorothy, at almost 90, no less, began undertaking modest landscaping. Dorothy was a self-taught gardener, one who eagerly shared her knowledge with friends and strangers who stopped to inquire as to what her plants were and how she propagated them. She said the fun of plants was in sharing them with others.
For his part, Walter was a man of figures. He spent most of his life in the world of finance. Leaving his native Toronto, he moved to the U.S., serving in both the Army and the Air Force, after which he moved to California to enter the insurance business and then to Rochester, New York, where, equipped with the G.I. Bill, he earned his bachelor’s from the Rochester Institute of Technology and where he met Dorothy. They ultimately returned to her Northern Neck roots in Weems and Walter entered the milieu of banking, serving as the operations vice president of the Bank of Lancaster.
In that arena, he left colleagues and clients in awe of his comprehension of figures and machines. He went into banking at a time when the computer age was beginning to dawn. He mastered it quite quickly. As one of his colleagues remarked, “Walter can have a brilliant conversation with a computer, when all the rest of us cannot understand a word he says, but in the end, it all works out.”
Walter decided to retire early in order to be able to enjoy traveling with Dorothy. On the occasion of his retirement, the late Austin Roberts, the bank’s president, referred to him as a ‘tower of finance” and indeed he was. Most importantly, at the bank, no employee and no customer were beyond Walter’s willingness to help. He truly gave his all to his profession, and professional he was through and through. In all the years that I knew him, I never saw him without his coat and tie.
Years later, I asked him how he kept up with the rapidly changing world of technology. He replied that he did not, noting that when he left the bank, he left the computers with it, adding that he did not own a computer, however after Dorothy died five years ago, he relented and bought himself a computer. The progress of technology during the interlude of his sitting out the computer age, caused him to remark that at 90 he was “starting over again.”
In recent years, to be near his family, Walter had returned to Rochester, albeit with a heavy heart at leaving this area he had adopted as his own, as the Northern Neck had adopted him as well.
Walter Bert Carr, May 15, 1931 – September 3, 2024. R.I.P.
