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 The buckeye lying amongst other previously pocketed items
on the table of Mr. Paul Carroll define the era from which
he sprang - the Great Depression and World War II - when
it was common for men to carry buckeyes in their pockets.
No mere good luck charm, the buckeye was said to help
relieve the pain of arthritis and rheumatism.
Mr. Paul was born nearly 77 years ago, on February 2,
1925, on a farm just outside McKenzie.
"The old farmhouse is still there," says Mr. Paul,
describing the farm's location as being where the Ford
Dealership is located today on Highway 79 toward Paris.
Carroll was the oldest child of the family, with parents
Harry and Lucille Carroll later having two daughters,
Betty and Nell. Today his sisters are Betty Wheat of Paris
and Nell McAden from Mississippi, near Memphis.
While his mom spoiled him, he admits with a smile, his dad
set him to work on the farm. "We worked from dusk 'til
dusk," he declares, raising cotton and food crops, milk
cows and hogs.
Sunday offered a respite from the drudgery of chores, with
the mornings spent in worship at the U.S.A. Presbyterian
Church on Shiloh Road.
"I had a horse I rode on Sunday afternoon," Carroll says
in the charming, colloquial southern English of his era.
He had trained the young filly himself, and had his share
of falls from the bucking horse until she was broken in
for riding. "I just got back on there," he says matter of
factly.
His grandmother, Ada (pronounced locally as Ader), had an
old horse named Wheeler that pulled her buggy, but his
father had a black, four-door Model A Ford. "Most families
had a car of some sort," he said of those living in his
neighborhood.
Carroll went to school in McKenzie, about two miles from
home, catching the bus "up at the old highway as we call
it now," he says. The bus transported 40 children to
school each morning in two loads with the first route
running from Milan's Store up Shiloh Road, then to the
school before circling back to pick up the 15 children in
Mr. Paul's neighborhood.
"The bus" consisted of a specially made, enclosed truck
bed that was fitted onto the back of a truck. Children
entered the bus through a back door and took their places
on the benches that ran alongside either wall.
"The man that owned the bus took that bed off when school
was out in the summertime and at Christmastime and used
the truck for something else," Carroll explained.
It was while riding horses with a group of friends one
Sunday afternoon that the boys heard the news that the
United States had joined the war in what had become World
War II.
Following graduation from high school, Carroll made one
more crop with his family, then - "disgusted with farming"
- he joined the United States Army, taking his training at
Camp Fanning in Tyler, Texas.
He was sent to New York and "transferred around to two or
three different places" before he became weary of the
inaction and told his superiors, "Why don't you send me
overseas?"
"I opened my big mouth to the wrong fella then 'cause he
sent me down to the 100th Infantry Division," Carroll
related, wide-eyed.
In two weeks of trans-Atlantic travel the convoy of
troop-bearing ships reached the shores of Southern France
where German planes strafing the decks, forcing the men to
jump overboard in order to reach the shore.
Carroll recalls France as a beautiful country with cold
winters from his vantage point high in the Alps mountains.
The division, trained as mountain troops, wintered in the
caves of the mountains.
"For about a month there we had to stop and just try to
stay warm; all the rest of them did, too. We had two
winters to live through that thing."
The 100th Division was part of a larger operation
involving four American divisions and one French division.
As part of a platoon responsible for laying mines, Carroll
recalls, "The year that the war ended, we had put out more
mines that summer; I think that's what made them stop. We
just drove the Germans out."
Working with the mines, "you just had to know what you
were doing," he relates. "The scariest part about it was
when we got orders to go back and take them up! We cleared
a lot of the minefield after the war kind of slowed down
to make sure we didn't leave something to hurt somebody."
Originally sent as a group of replacements for other
troops lost in the war, Carroll was one of only two
survivors in the anti-tank platoon.
He maintained contact with John Mosely, one of the friends
who had been with him at the store when the boys first
heard about the war, and who was also fighting in Europe
near Carroll’s division.
At the war's end, having made his way from France into
Germany, Carroll remained in Europe as a member of the
occupation forces as an MP (Military Police), during which
he recalls the soldiers had a lot of free time while
cleaning up equipment to ship back to the United States.
Back home, he taught agriculture courses to veterans who
were also home from the war, as part of a post-war program
sponsored by the federal government. "Teaching agriculture
was more or less a way to give boys some excuses to work
and make money," he says.
During this time period, he started courting Nellie Ann
Vick, a girl from his neighborhood who he had known most
of his life. "I thought she was pretty," he says,
recalling dates spent at the picture shows, at dances or
sitting around the ice cream parlor in McKenzie. The
couple dated about a year before getting married when he
was 24 or 25 years old and she was a little younger.
He quit teaching in order to manage the McKenzie Seed
Company, an enterprise he had bought into with partner
Billy Vawter. "Six to eight years later," he says, "I said
something about selling out to do something else and one
of the boys said, 'Are you serious? I'll buy you out!"
 He sold the company to John Mosely and took a job working
for the Wallace Seed Company in Jackson, traveling from
Mississippi up into Kentucky as a representative of the
company. "It was about as hard a work as the old job," he
recalls of his then-new position. After about five years,
he grew "tired of the road every day" and began to set
about changing the direction of his career.
"I kindly knew a bunch of insurance agents and I felt like
I could do as good or better than some of them could," he
says. Although some people attended classes designed to
teach the insurance business, Carroll says, "I just read
the book."
He entered into a partnership with Billy Bryant, buying
Leach's Insurance Agency in 1960. The partnership
continued for 25 years until 1985 when Carroll bought the
business.
Carroll has been an active participant in the McKenzie
Industrial Board since its inception in the mid-1960s,
working closely with men like Hoot Gibson and Billy
Barksdale to help bring industry to McKenzie.
He recalls one of the organization's greatest
accomplishments as being the construction of the
Industrial Park on the outskirts of McKenzie toward
Huntingdon, an enterprise that required the accumulation
of funds and purchase of land as well as the development
of the location.
 He was also instrumental in bringing the hospital to
McKenzie. During this time, he was also an elected
magistrate of the county court, operating as finance
chairman.
Carroll was part of a delegation that traveled to
Nashville to meet with Governor Ned McWherter to promote
the improvements of Highway 22 from McKenzie to Gleason
and Highway 79 to Paris, that remains under construction.
He stepped out of the limelight of the insurance business
in 1990, when he sold the Paul Carroll Insurance Agency to
his son and daughter-in-law, Jimmy and Ruth Carroll.
Jimmy has had a taste of his family's farming roots as
well following in his father's footsteps in the insurance
business, having previously run a hog-farming operation.
Mr. Paul also had a yearning to return to farming that led
him to buy a stretch of farmland some 20 years ago from
the estate of his aunt, Ellen Kemp. "I just wanted to
farm," he says of the land where he keeps beef cattle. "Up
until a couple of years ago I had a man who lived there
and tended to the cows; I've done it myself since 1989."
He enjoys feeding the cows, watching after them and seeing
to the water and fences at the farm. An entrepreneur at
heart, he used a portion of the land in building the Holly
Hills subdivision that branches out from Shiloh Road
behind Dr. Sumrok's office and the McKenzie High School.
Sadly, Carroll lost his wife Nellie Ann several years ago,
after which his sister Nell came to live with him for
about four years, finishing out her nursing career at the
Methodist Hospital in McKenzie.
The house in which Carroll lives today, he says, was a
house his wife wanted to build after seeing the house
plans in the books she enjoyed reading. Especially lovely
is the sun porch that looks out upon the back lawn.
Jimmy and Ruth, have two children, both in college. Paul
attends Bethel College and assists in coaching the high
school football team in McKenzie. He plans to coach
football as a part of his career following graduation.
Rachel attends college in Providence, Rhode Island. "It's
been good for her - it made her grow up and she loves it
up there," says her grandfather.
Carroll's oldest son, Mike, is a former teacher in
Knoxville who is now assistant principal at Farragut High
School in Knoxville.
Mike has three sons: Brandon, who is now in film school at
Florida State University; Brett, who is a student at
Middle Tennessee State University; and Chase, who is a
freshman in high school.
Mr. Carroll is a member of the U.S.A. Presbyterian Church
in McKenzie. |
