U.S. ARMY AIR CORPS

Carle Gray

From first to last, former Army Air Corps Cpl. Carle G. Gray is modest about his contribution to the war effort. Stationed in England, he piloted a desk — not an airplane — for the duration.

“I never left the ground,” he said. He describes his wartime self as “a clerical functionary” in the finance office, making sure the officers and enlisted men were paid timely and accurately. He rose through a couple of ranks to corporal, “in which rank my involuntary and undistinguished military career honorably closed.”

Gray was born in Sullivan on March 1, 1920. He lives there still. He studied piano and trombone in Bangor and graduated from Bangor High School, class of 1937. He then entered the Bentley School of Accounting and Finance in Boston. Upon graduation in 1941, he took a job as an accountant with a firm in Greenfield, Mass., that operated retail feed and grain stores.

He was right at home, for his father, the legendary L.A. Gray, owned a feed and grain store himself. Indeed, L.A. Gray was one of the Greenfield company’s largest independent retail customers in Maine. In October 1941, Gray married Charlotte Grindle of South Blue Hill. A year passed and he was drafted.

Gray crossed the Atlantic in November 1943 on the original Cunard luxury liner, the Queen Mary. The liner may have been luxurious but the passage wasn’t: crowded, uncomfortable and without the reassuring accompaniment of a destroyer escort.

“We were told not to worry about any threat from German submarines because the Queen could out-run them. But could she out-maneuver them? It was unthinkable to ‘question authority’ and punishable besides,” Gray recollected.

These days Gray, 85, questions authority regularly, as any reader of The American’s Letters to the Editor page can attest.

Gray was stationed in England, first in East Anglia. In April 1944, he was relocated to Boxted, “near Colchester, an ancient Roman town about 40 miles east of London on the L&NE (late and never early) railway.”

He worked conscientiously and with a will, “as speedily as possible consistent with accuracy, to allow as much time as possible for hotly contested cribbage games which I, as one of only two New Englanders in our little office, had introduced to the group of mostly Californians.”

But life was not risk-free. The occasional German buzz bomb, en route to London, would fall short and explode in the area of Gray’s posting. On the other hand, furloughs in London were fun. Country boy Gray attended two symphony concerts at the Royal Albert Hall. And Major Glenn Miller and his orchestra visited Boxted on Aug. 6, 1944, and performed in a hangar there.

The former Bangor trombone student was drafted into a 12-member dance band organized by a group of Special Service officers. And so it went until war’s end and Gray’s honorable discharge Nov. 21, 1945.

Gray and Charlotte had two sons and a daughter, ages 59, 56 and 45 today. He and Charlotte settled in Ellsworth from 1945 to 1972 and he went to work for Horace Little, a local CPA, and after passing his CPA exam in 1952, became Little’s partner.

Over the years, as principals came and left, the firm’s name changed from Little & Gray to Little, Gray & Horton, to Gray, Horton & McFarland and — after Gray’s retirement in 1970 — Horton, McFarland and Veysey.

Gray keeps himself informed on issues of state and local government and continues to play the trombone with the Shriners and, on Wednesday nights during the summer, with the Ellsworth Town Band.

—Stephen Fay