By: Ed Carroll, an editor whose devotion to newspapering was so deep that his wife plans to have him buried with a newspaper in his hands, died Sunday at his home in Clinton of an apparent heart attack. He was 66.
Carroll's career spanned 44 years at New Jersey weekly and daily newspapers, the last nine on the news desk of the Daily Record of Parsippany.
He met his wife of 39 years, Rosemary, when both were editors of New Jersey weekly newspapers.
"He was the quintessential community journalist," said Rosemary Carroll, now director of development for the New Brunswick Theological Seminary.
He was known for a dry sense of humor and an ability to find stories in places few others look. He often cut out newspaper legal advertisements and left them on reporters' desks. One such ad for a name change application led to a story about how post-9/11 security prevented a man from getting a driver's license because his name had been misspelled on a birth certificate 49 years before.
Carroll was born in Lansdowne, Pa. He got his start in journalism while serving in the Army from 1963-65, working on a base newspaper in Alaska.
He went on to lead groups of weekly newspapers as executive editor in three states, beginning with The Princeton Packet Group in New Jersey from 1965 to 1975. He moved on to lead the Time Inc.-owned Pioneer Press in North Shore Chicago, Ill., for four years. Starting in 1979, he served as executive editor of MPG Communications in Plymouth, Mass., and later Beacon Communications in Concord, Mass.
He returned to New Jersey in 1988 to head the editorial division of Forbes Newspapers in Somerville. He joined the Daily Record as assistant metro editor in 1999.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by three sons, Edward Jr., Brian and Patrick, and a sister, Mary Jane Aklonis.
A funeral Mass was scheduled for Wednesday.
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here