Beaufort-Person-Durham County NcArchives Biographies.....Carver, Leroy Abb 
Carver October 26, 1925 - February 10, 2011
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File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by:
Linda Carver Clark sixwingedstrings@msn.com May 13, 2011, 10:57 pm

Source: Sam Blount's personal letter
Author: Sam Blount, Jr., PE, PLS (RET)

My Life with The Carvers
By Sam M. Blount, Jr., PE, PLS (Ret)
February 11, 2011

Leroy and his father, Roy, played a great part in influencing me and guiding 
me through the formative years of my career. During the summer of 1947, Leroy 
gave me a job as a helper. At that time he was running the shop and doing 
general machine repair and welding and also repairing outboard motors, and 
straightening bent shafts of inboard power boats.

Of course we all knew Miss Elsie at her Drive-Inn Soda Shop. This was the place 
to be after school. We could thumb a ride by standing on Main Street in front of 
the Guaranty Bank (now Wachovia Bank), and friendly people would stop and give 
you a ride to Miss Carvers Soda Shop. We wouldn’t dare thumb a ride nowadays
because for fear of being abducted, or worse. She served the most delicious 
refreshments and food. This was the place to meet with all your friends.

Mister Carver’s Boat Docks and Sheds

Mister Carver, Roy, had three long piers which extended out into Runyon 
Creek, two of them were covered and contained boat stalls that could be rented. 
The other piers had pilings for boat slips also for rent. In those days the 
creek was over ten feet deep and not all silted in as it is now a grand place to 
keep boats. Also, beside the railroad trestle, Mister Carver had a marine
railway with rail tracks and winch where boats could be hauled out for bottom 
scraping, painting, and repair. I used to fish from the trestle when I was a 
teenager during the 1940s and early 1950s and I was fascinated by the marine 
railway. Almost everyone in Washington, and even as far away as Rocky Mount, who 
had boats kept them at docks in Runyon Creek either Mister Carver’s or across 
the creek at Heber Alligood’s docks and boat sheds.

At that time Mister Carver had the dealership for Chris Craft boats, and he 
kept several new models of runabouts there for display and demonstration. Mugsy, 
Leroy’s sister, was always the one who took potential customers on a 
demonstration joy ride, and boy, could she ever make those bone-chilling, tight 
turns which threw out high walls of water to wash down the piers and boathouses. 
She often let me go along for the ride, and I was thrilled to death.

The Old Wooden Bridge

Right before you got to the Shop on Main Street, the street turned on to the 
old wooden bridge which crossed Runyon Creek into Washington Park. The old 
bridge made a very acute angle with the two roads connected to it. The new 
bridge was located to straighten out the roadway. You can still see where the 
old bridge was located because the City did not move the power poles which were 
alongside the bridge. If you go to the end of the street now, you can sight 
along the power poles and see the location of the old bridge. People used to 
dive off the bridge at the fendered opening where the boats went through, for 
the creek was deep at that time and the depth there was about 8 to 10 feet. If 
you tried that today you would go head-first into mud up to your waste line or 
break your neck. That bridge was phased out and replaced by the new concrete 
bridge built in 1949 and it too just recently replaced.

Test Pile for the New Bridge

My father built the first house just across the bridge in 1948. The first test 
piling for the new bridge was driven where my father had his boathouse alongside 
the south side of the new bridge.

The piling top has rotted off now, but its stub is just below the low water 
level and is just as good and strong as it was the day it was driven. I watched 
them drive the test piling. It was a 36” diameter piling 40-feet long. It was 
dragged upright by a crane with a steam-driven pile driver at the top of the 
piling. The first blow struck by the pile driver sent the piling plunging into 
the mud where it was buried about 15 feet below the mud. They had to pull up the 
piling above water, splice another on top of it, and attempt to drive it again. 
The blow to the second piling sent the spliced piling about 15 feet below the 
mud, and again they had to extract the piling and splice another on top of the 
other two. This time the pile driver hammered the piling down to where
only about 10 feet of the piling was above water. The spliced piling now was 
firmly bottomed on bedrock.

Leroy Comes Home From the Navy

After the War (World War II), Leroy came home from the Navy. He was a young 
sailor and a Coxswain on a Landing Barge (LCVP) during nine invasions of 
Japanese-held territories. He told me stories of seeing the forward door or 
landing ramp of a sister Landing Barge being hit by a Japanese cannon shell and 
go spinning off into space, much as one would skip an oyster shell into the sky. 
His job was to ferry marines, soldiers, and heavy equipment from the mother ship 
to the beach and return for another run. As his landing craft approached the 
beach at full speed, several hundred yards out, he would release an anchor for 
use with a winch and cable to pull the Landing Barge off the beach after its 
cargo had been offloaded for the return trip. He had to make this trip many 
times during each invasion to land troops and equipment on the beach all at 
peril to his own life with bullets whizzing all around him. The lifespan of 
a Coxswain on this type of landing craft was very short, and many did not 
survive. How Leroy survived all that carnage, I will never know.

During leave time, Leroy, being a very young sailor, refused to join his 
shipmates for a wild time on shore leave with all the drinking and other stuff 
you can imagine. Instead he would go aboard some of the larger ships: cruisers, 
battleships, and aircraft carriers that had large, complete machine shops. 
Machinists there were more than glad to accept him as a young pupil and teach 
him things they knew how to do. His great love was working with metal ¡V 
cutting, shaping, welding, turning on a lathe, grinding, and polishing, and 
related metalworking arts. It was there that he perfected his great skills in 
metalwork.

The Shop

The Shop was located at the end of Main Street which came right by Miss 
Elsie's Soda Shop which served the most delicious malted milks and snow cones. 
The Shop had a concrete slab floor and was equipped with motorized hacksaw; 
acetylene welding tanks and related equipment; the old LeBlond lathe where I 
learned to turn metal (and which I think is still in service today); stationary 
grinding machines for fashioning lathe bits and other items; a hand grinder 
which was probably the most used tool along with the cutting torch; pitch blocks 
for mending boat propellers; all the bits, drills, wheel pullers, pry bars, and 
tools one could ever imagine.

One interesting procedure Leroy had learned in the Navy was that of 
straightening boat propeller shafts that been bent for one reason or another. 
Other machinists said Leroy was crazy and that such a thing couldn’t be done, 
but they didn¡¦t know Leroy. He would chuck up the shaft in the old Le Blond 
lathe, spin the shaft until its greatest deflection was straight down, prize up
on the shaft at that point from the bottom with a pry bar until the shaft was 
deflected upwards about twice the amount, and strike soundly down on the shaft 
at that point with a 5-pound steel hammer. About two times doing this and the 
shaft would gauge out to no more than three-thousandths of an inch out of round 
¡V a magnificent accomplishment and a most acceptable tolerance.

Repairs were made to broken chainsaws, which were generally 10 feet long and 
manned by some of the dumbest people you could ever imagine who never bothered 
to take care of the chainsaws in any way. This was a large part of the business 
at that time since logging all over this and surrounding counties was in full 
swing.

One big logging problem was how to get large logs, after they had been cut 
down, out of the swamps to the hauling trucks. Usually the logs were ¡§snaked¡¨ 
out of the woods by men and mules with the mules dragging the logs by one end. 
Sometimes bulldozers were used to extricate the logs, but many times they got 
bogged down in the muddy swamps and had to be dragged out by other bulldozers. I 
don’t know if Leroy was the inventor or not, but he began constructing and
selling log dinghies, a motorized contraption similar to a monster dunes 
buggy with large, oversized tires with chains and a souped-up automobile engine 
on a very rigid frame. Demand was high and log dinghies became a large part of 
the business. They were a favorite of independent loggers who worked in places 
the big logging companies would not go.

I assisted Leroy as a paid helper during the summers of 1948-1950. Among the 
regular shop repairs he (and I accompanied him) did everything from going out in 
the woods and repairing and changing a track on a bulldozer to hauling a 500-
yard raft of logs from Nevil¡¦s Creek to the Eureka Mill at night. What a 
wonderful 5-hour trip on a moonless night in the summer of 1949. His help in 
assisting me to learn basic shop techniques was the basis of my wanting to learn
engineering and all the technical skills required of the mechanical trades. I 
credit Leroy for guiding me through my career as a Consulting Engineer.
The Dredge

In 1948, Leroy and Mister Carver went to the scrap yards in Norfolk where 
Navy surplus war goods were available to the public at rock-bottom prices. They 
purchased two Navy LCVPs (short for Landing Craft Vehicles Personnel), winches, 
pulleys, gears, motors, gasoline and diesel engines, large suction pumps, 
piping, and other heavy equipment. Leroy towed one LCVP behind the other (which 
was loaded with the other equipment) down the Inland Waterway from Norfolk to 
Carver’s Docks in Washington, NC. At the Shop Leroy and his father commenced the 
building of a barge platform on which they would construct a suction dredge. 
After the barge was built, the dredging equipment began to be assembled and 
constructed and was comprised in part of the following items: the two rear spuds 
with lifting towers to fix the position of the dredge, the side anchors and 
winches with which to pull the dredge boat from side to side, tht operator;s 
platform with cab and chair, operating levers, foot pedals, throttles, brakes, 
and other devices to operate the dredging equipment from a central position,
tht forward boom with suction pipe and a cutter head, tht large dredging suction 
pump and gasoline engine, the corrugated-metal discharge piping of 24 to 36 
diameter which they constructed themselves out of corrugated steel by rolling a 
sheet into a cylinder and welding the seams, the barrel floats for elevating the 
discharge piping above water level, a tender for moving all the equipment 
around.

Basically the dredge operated in this manner:
The rear of the dredge was anchored by one or the other spud at the rear,
The side anchors at the front of the dredge were pulled out by the tender at 
right angles to the dredge. The end of the discharge piping was anchored on 
shore where the sand or spoil was to be deposited. The suction engine was 
started and primed and the end of the forward boom with the cutter head was 
lowered down to the sand on the bottom. As the cutter head rotated, its teeth 
dug into the sand and the loosed sand was sucked up the pipe, through the pump, 
through the discharge piping, and onto the shore. The operator manipulated the 
cutter head through an arc over the bottom of the river by winching the cable to 
the side anchor on the same side as the spud that is down into the sand. This 
pulled the cutter head over the bottom sucking a large swath of sand that was to
be discharged on shore.

As the end of the arc was reached, the opposite spud was lowered into the 
bottom of the river, and the first spud raised up above the bottom. Then the 
first anchor line was relaxed and the other anchor was gradually winched in.
At every cycle the dredge was walked forward to begin sucking up a new 
swath of sand. Now mind you, all this design work for the dredge construction 
was done nether with pencil and paper nor plans on paper as far as I could 
ascertain ¡V it was all in the minds of these two brilliant men. How they 
determined the winch drum sizes, gear sizes and ratios, motor horsepower, cable 
sizes, and size of the barge to buoy up the heavy machinery without tipping
over, I will never know. I graduated from college in 1955 with degrees in 
Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering and have 55 years of experience as a 
Consulting Engineer, and I still don’t know how they accomplished this feat. 
Their combined genius is way beyond my comprehension.

During World War I, Mister Carver had served in the Army and had been 
subjected by the Germans to the poisonous Mustard Gas which severely damaged his 
lungs and breathing capacity; however, he continued to smoke cigarettes anyway. 
And sometimes when he spoke, he uttered a low, guttural Hawwww sound which was 
very disconcerting if you weren’t already aware of it. He also had a habit of 
squatting down on his haunches rather than sitting down. I was never able to 
accomplish this feat comfortably, but he could. I suppose it is a preferred 
posture to assume if the ground or floor is wet and there are no benches, boxes, 
or chairs to sit on.

Sometimes when we working on the dredge, Mister Carver would squat on his 
Haunches while smoking a cigarette and say to me, Sam, is steam a gas or a 
vapor? I, of course didn’t know the answer until I went to engineering school 
the following fall. The next summer when he asked me that question, which I 
hoped he would, I replied triumphantly, Mister Carver, steam is a vapor which, 
under certain conditions of temperature and pressure, exhibits the properties of 
a perfect gas. He then said, I thought you would never learn.

My Boat

Now in the Shop hanging overhead was the partial construction of a boat which 
was done by Leroy¡¦s brother, Carlton, who had died earlier. Leroy planned to 
finish it one day himself, but he decided to build his own boat. Leroy, myself, 
and Ivan Willard were the best of friends, and we did things together. Leroy 
made his own boat, installed a motor, and ran it out on the river. It was
very fast and could beat anything around. I think he sold that boat to Ivan 
which he named Ike’s Heap. It was then I wanted a boat of my own, and Leroy said 
he would help me get started. He began by building a structure like that of a 
hydroplane which I helped to finish. In the summer of 1959 Ivan and I drove up 
to Peck Iron Works in Norfolk in Ivan’s mother’s car and bought two surplus, 50-
hp, handibilly fire pumps for $50.00 apiece and brought them back to the Shop. 
Now this pump was especially made for the Navy for use aboard ship for putting 
out fires with sea water. It was designed using a 35-hp Evinrude Outboard Motor 
modified with roller bearings on the crankshaft and needle bearings on the 
piston wrist pins and with a high-lipped piston head for use with 100-octane 
aviation gasoline. It was mounted in a tubular frame and directly connected
to a fire pump with a 6 suction hose and two 2-1/2 discharge connections.

To test these pumps, Leroy borrowed some hoses from the Fire Department and 
connected them to the handibilly fire pump on one of the piers. Four firemen, 
who came to witness the event, two on each hose, stood ready as Leroy wound the 
starter cord around the engine flywheel and pulled up hard. The engine roared up 
to its 10,000 rpm top speed, the pump primed itself, and the hoses straightened 
out under the tremendous pressure generated by the pump. One hose straightened 
out lifting the two firemen holding down the nozzle into the air, promptly 
bursting from the pressure just behind the two firemen, and propelling them 
halfway between the pier and the bridge into the creek. Fortunately for them, 
the creek was not deep at that point. The other hose held and a 2-1/2¡¨ stream 
of high-pressure water squirted in a high arc over the bridge. It was a wondrous 
sight to behold, and everyone there applauded loudly. I think Leroy told the
firemen they better get some new hoses. He converted and installed one of the 
engines in my boat with a straight drive connecting the propeller shaft, 
fashioned a rudder out of sheet brass to fit on the rear of the boat, and built 
a steel exhaust manifold with a 4 diameter pipe exhaust pipe sticking out over 
the  side of the boat. It was the loudest thing heard on the river. I wasn¡¦t 
allowed to operate it on Sunday during church hours for fear of disrupting 
services. The noise of my engine could be heard all over Town even on a windy 
day. The boat was painted with large polka dots on the top and sides and was 
named, Samuels Coffin. It was my pride and joy. I could spend all day out on the 
river for about $2.00 

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