Sam Carsley and Me

This was taken December 9, 1967.  Photographer Robert Crow took our picture synchronizing our watches to make sure we got to the church on time for my wedding.  Actually the wedding place was just a room or two away.

Sam and I knew each other literally all but the first seven months of his life.  We both were babies in the Clay Home.  His father Norman Carsley  in the Navy in WWII lost his life when a suicide Japanese plane crashed into his part of the ship.

Through the years we talked via phone few times a week.  Politically we disagreed, but the arts we had the same taste, we were crazy about EC comics, MAD comics and its artists, music, history, and photography.  Sam was an expert photographer.  Sam graduated from Georgia Tech with a degree in physics engineering.  He became a top programmer in Cobalt, just before there was no more use in the computer world for Colbalt.

About six years after Anna was married our son Rocky was born which then we needed  a bigger house.  We had Sam over for dinner one evening and told him we planned on selling and getting a bigger house.  Sam bought it!

After that Sam married for the third time.  His wife Lita loved to work in the yard and Sam didn’t, so they got along fine.

But there was Sam’s mother Hazel Baldwin Carsley.  Hazel came down with Alzheimer’s disease.  Which Sam got her put in a nursing home and visited her daily.

Years after that he realized he was getting Alzheimer’s symptoms.  He did not want Lita to go through what he went through, or even himself for that matter.  On April’s Fool Day  he took his life with a bullet.  He shot himself in the chest, muffling the sound with a pillow, so he would not disturb Lita.