Morris’ Dave Carr fulfilled longtime dream in Navy

Ask a recent eighth-grade graduate what they want to do when they get out of high school, and most either wouldn’t be able to give an answer or have an answer that would change if you asked them a week or two later.

That wasn’t the case with Morris’ Dave Carr. Carr, a 1985 Morris graduate, had his plans secure in his mind before he stepped into the school as a student.

“My brother, Walter, joined the Navy in 1981,” Carr said. “I thought before I started high school that the Navy was what I wanted to do after high school. By the time my sophomore year came around, I knew that was what I wanted, and I had a plan for it. When I was a junior, I signed up for the delayed-entry program. I went to Chicago and did all the physical testing they do for every recruit. I signed up a year before I was going to leave.

“About a week or two after I graduated, I was off to boot camp.”

Carr spent five years in the U.S. Navy, starting with boot camp in Orlando, Florida. He achieved the rank of yeoman, and he performed clerical and administrative duties.

“I was basically a Radar O’Reilly in the Navy,” Carr said.

After completing boot camp, Carr was stationed at the Navy Annex in Washington, D.C. Although he enjoyed being in the nation’s capital, the sense of adventure inherent in the Navy won out.

“I was supposed to spend all four years of my enlistment in Washington,” he said. “But, around the end of 1986 and start of 1987, I decided I didn’t want to spend all four years onshore. That’s not what I joined the Navy for. I wanted to go to sea, and I was looking to get onto a ship.”

It just so happened that the Navy was completing the building of a new ship. The USS Princeton, an AEGIS cruiser CG59, was being completed in Pascagoula, Mississippi. However, it was going to take longer than Carr’s initial enlistment, so he extended his enlistment for a year to be able to go to sea.

“I went into pre-com duty while the ship was being built,” Carr said. “I was one of the first crew to be assigned to the ship, and I was working for the captain. I had to go to firefighting school in San Diego before the ship was commissioned in February of 1989.”

Carr was a member of the crew that manned the ship as it was transported to its home port in Long Beach, California. The original route was supposed to take them from Mississippi through the Gulf of Mexico and around South America to get to Long Beach.

Fate, however, saw things differently.

“There was an uprising in Haiti at the time,” Carr said. “They didn’t want us to get too close to Haiti, so we ended up changing our course and taking the shortcut through the Panama Canal.

“The canal is amazing. It’s definitely something you should see if you ever get a chance. One thing that I remember about it is that it took so long to get through it, and a ship is really a sitting duck when it’s in that canal. There’s nowhere else to go.

“I was only 21 at the time, and everything was a lot different than my little hometown of Morris.”

Carr completed his five years of enlistment and returned to Morris to join the workforce. He lives in Morris with his wife, Amy, and his two sons, Kellen and Kyler. In addition to his full-time job with AT&T in Hammond, Indiana, Carr also is the scoreboard and clock operator for Morris football, boys and girls soccer, boys and girls basketball and wrestling. Amy is an assistant coach in both the volleyball and basketball programs.

“I’ve been all over the place for my job,” he said. “I’ve worked in Arlington Heights, Blue Island, Montgomery, Carol Stream, Romeoville and Westmont before Hammond. I was given a choice of working in Chicago or working in Hammond, and I chose Hammond.

“The weird thing is that none of my Navy training has entered into what I do now. When I first got out of the Navy, I wanted to be a policeman, but that didn’t work out. I got the opportunity to work for the cable company. Ameritech at the time was forming a cable company of its own, and I started with them, and have moved on to AT&T. I’ve been working in this business for 28 years.

“When I started in the Navy, I had ambitions of doing 20 to 30 years and retiring. But, I was 18 to 23 years old when I was in the Navy, and when I got out at 23, I was still very immature. I didn’t really like being told what to do all the time. I was ready to get out.”