Honoring a Long Beach legend

In 1938, lifelong Long Beach resident Bob Carroll suffered a severe leg burn while his sister was making peanut brittle.

“She burnt it and went to throw it in the sink, and she tripped and threw it all over me,” Carroll, now 86, recounted. “I was in Long Beach Hospital for four months.”

While he was recovering, a relative visited and asked him if he’d like to meet his idol, Yankees legend Babe Ruth. “He brought him down here to Long Beach,” Carroll, a diehard Yankees fan, recalled. “He was standing in the doorway of Long Beach Hospital.”

The next day, Ruth took the boy for a ride around Long Beach and for a bite at Henning’s Fishing station in Atlantic Beach. “He said, ‘What are you going to have, kid? Try a lobster.’” Carroll said. “I never even saw a lobster. He went hysterical, because I didn’t know how to break the claws. He took me around the bay and the ocean and signed a baseball for me. It was a great experience to meet Babe Ruth.”

Carroll would grow up to become a mentor in his own right to many in Long Beach, mainly as the superintendent of the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation — a title he held for 30 years, during which he led a multi-million-dollar renovation and expansion of the Recreation Center in the late 1980s, establishing five playgrounds throughout town, boardwalk arts and crafts festivals, the popular summer concert series, summer camp programs, a swim team, popular races, Easter egg hunts, and other programs, services and events.

He also became a prominent member of the community through his charitable work as president of the Long Beach Lions Club and as a volunteer for the St. Mary of the Isle Food Pantry over the years.

On St. Patrick’s Day, hundreds of family, friends, residents, local clergy and elected officials gathered at the Recreation Center, on Magnolia Boulevard, to dedicate the athletic facility — where Carroll worked for 47 years, until he retired in 2004 — in his honor.

“Bob Carroll has changed the lives of tens of thousands of children,” Acting City Manager Michael Tangney said.

“Your legacy here in Long Beach is absolutely amazing,” City Council President Anthony Eramo told the crowd, and Carroll, on Saturday. “If everyone can strive to make the world a better place, as you have, we would all be successful if we just did a small part. And the amazing thing is, he continues to do it through his work with the Lions. This is a man we should all strive to be like.”

On March 6, the City Council voted to rename the facility the Robert L. Carroll Recreation Complex, after the city received a petition with more than 1,000 signatures requesting the move.

Councilman Scott Mandel said that the renaming was long overdue. “He had molded countless generations of people in our city,” he said of Carroll. “He continues to devote his time and volunteer his energy to Long Beach. I’m thrilled that generations to come will look up at his name on the Rec Center.”

A leader is born

Carroll was born in 1931 and grew up in an Irish family in the West End. “It was a tough place to live during the Depression,” Carroll said. “Now they have three-story houses and little bungalows.”

He graduated from Long Beach High School, where he was a star athlete. He attended SUNY Cortland, and served in the Army in the Korean War. He played baseball in Japan for two years during and after the war as a member of the First Cavalry Division. He earned a master’s in education from New York University, was a science, health and phys. ed. teacher in the Long Beach schools.

He became the assistant superintendent of recreation in Rockville Centre before he was urged to work at the Long Beach Recreation Center, which opened in 1955. Carroll oversaw the men’s baseball and softball leagues, whose participants included a youngster named Billy Crystal and another future Hollywood actor, Long Beach native Ed Lauter. “Coming to work every day, it was a pleasure,” Carroll said.

Former council President Kevin Braddish, a longtime friend and colleague of Carroll’s, said that when Carroll returned to Long Beach 62 years ago to coach seventh- and eighth-grade baseball, his leadership abilities were immediately evident. “It began to show what Bobby Carroll was going to be,” Braddish said. “We had no uniforms, we had no equipment, but Bobby, typical as he is to this day, started raising money. Together we worked on all of the programs that Bob had established, and his legacy goes unsaid.

“Bobby Carroll is recreation,” Braddish added. Whether it be roller hockey, the summer camp programs or arts and crafts, if a child didn’t have the money to go to those programs, Bob would send you out to the Kiwanis, out to the Lions, out to the [Knights of Columbus] or any number of organizations so that no child in Long Beach who wanted to participate [but couldn’t] did not participate.”

Frank Haggerty, a former recreation leader who worked with Carroll for more than 30 years, said that the Rec grew under his leadership.

Carroll said that under former Nassau County Executive Tom Gulotta, who served from 1987 to 2001, the Rec received an $8.5 million grant to refurbish the facility and boost programs and services.

“He said, ‘I have a grant for you if you could come up with a plan,’” Carroll recalled. “We did the entire facility over again. Well, you could see the plan has worked out 100 percent — we built a whole new facility, including a fishing pier, the parking lot, the ball fields, the ice skating arena, the swimming pool … and particularly the playgrounds throughout the community.”

Giving back to his town

Carroll is also known for his charitable work, and has received numerous city, state and national awards. Civil Service Employees Association President John Mooney said that Carroll, a CSEA president in the 1970s, would organize an effort with CSEA workers to give out turkeys during the holidays through the Lions Club.

“I witnessed him go into his own pocket to help people in need, whether they were hungry or had fallen on hard times,” said Charles “Moose” Gusler, who worked for Carroll. “I’ve seen him bring people to rehabs [and] shelters, and I’ve witnessed him bring bags of food to people’s homes and buy clothes for those who needed them. All of these things he did in addition to running the recreation center.”

School board Trustee Dr. Dennis Ryan said that the day after Hurricane Sandy, he and Carroll took a walk on what was left of the boardwalk. The longtime friends noted the devastation, and soon afterward the Rec was transformed into a relief center.

“I saw how ravaged he was by what had happened to his city,” Ryan said of Carroll, “because he loves his city.”