Elliott G Carr

Elliott Grabill Carr, a bank president turned bird photographer, whose life was defined by his dual passions for Cape Cod and for family, died on April 24. He was 87, and although Alzheimer’s had faded his memory over the last decade, it never claimed his sharp wit.

Born in Hanover, New Hampshire in 1938, Elliott was the middle of three sons of Robert K. Carr, a Dartmouth political science professor who later became president of Oberlin College (1960-1970); and Olive (Grabill) Carr, a homemaker who, when the boys had grown, earned her master’s in social work from Howard University and promptly put it to use.

Elliott, known as Ellio as a boy, was by many accounts the calmest and most well-behaved of the Carr boys — a fact which speaks mostly to what a truly unruly household it must have been.

Elliott stayed in Hanover for college, graduating from Dartmouth in 1960, where he competed on the ice hockey team. He spent a year at Princeton studying economics before deciding that an academic life was not for him and transferring to Harvard, where he earned his MBA. After a short stint as a clerk typist in the Army Reserve, Elliott worked for Mass Indemnity, an insurance firm in Needham, and then moved on to the Massachusetts Savings Bank Association in Boston, where he served several years as president in the 1970s.

At the Savings Bank Association, Elliott was the leader in getting approval through U.S. Congress to introduce the so-called NOW account, which enabled savings bank clients to open checking accounts. That act effectively saved local savings banks which had been struggling to stay afloat against commercial competitors.

In 1967, Elliott met Susan Wheatley, the librarian at Lincoln-Sudbury High School, on a double date. Susan was paired with Elliott’s roommate and Elliott with Susan’s roommate. But Elliott was so smitten by the young librarian that they switched not long after. A few months later, Elliott and Susan got engaged while driving on the New Jersey Turnpike. (Miraculously, their friends from the double date continued to speak to them.)

The couple settled in Pembroke, Mass, where Elliott served on the school committee and Susan on the library board. This was the start of decades of deep civic engagement. In 1982, Elliott left the Savings Bank Association to accept a job as president of The Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank (CC5), and the couple moved to Brewster with their two young daughters.

In a 2024 appreciation, local journalist Seth Rolbein noted that at the CC5, Elliott, “presided over an era of explosive economic growth…as close as we’d get to Jimmy Stewart in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’ When a Wellfleet fisherman was lost at sea, boat gone too, Elliott let his board know they’d be forgiving a $30,000 note. When the economy skidded into recession early in his tenure, he quietly stalled foreclosures on families and businesses, giving people a chance to claw back.”

Nearly every time the CC5 had stock in another local bank that was acquired by an off-Cape chain, Elliott divested and used the funds to expand the CC5’s philanthropic foundation — ensuring that much of the bank’s wealth stayed local and went to those who needed it.

By the time Elliott retired from the bank in 2005, the number of Cape-based banks had dwindled dramatically. Today, there are only three left: The Cape Cod Five, Cape Cod Cooperative, and Seamen’s Savings.

At various times, Elliott served on or chaired the boards of Cape Cod Community College, Cape Cod Hospital, the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, the Association to Preserve Cape Cod, Wellfleet Audubon, the International Fund for Animal Welfare, and about a dozen more nonprofit organizations. He believed that a core part of his role leading the Cape’s largest local bank was to protect the community’s largest, and most irreplaceable, asset: its natural environment.

While not always invested in social niceties—if he had had his way, Elliott would have gone everywhere in a rumpled Hawaiian shirt and faded shorts—he remained ever invested in the social good.

After his retirement in 2005, Elliott embraced his love for environmentalism and artistry, as a writer and photographer. He wrote a regular column for The Cape Cod Times and then The Cape Cod Voice. And he had many adventures during a year spent walking the entire coastline of the Cape with family and friends to write “Walking the Shores of Cape Cod.” Skirting a bit too close to land in a gated community not far from the Kennedy compound one afternoon, Elliott and Susan were escorted off of the beach by police.

Elliott insisted that he was not much of a photographer or a legitimate birder, but that he was, in fact, a “bird photographer” — ever his own rare breed. He spent hundreds of hours with a wide-angle lens near a Brewster osprey nest to produce “In the Beginning: An Osprey Family Story.” And his photographs were also on display in two other books: “Birds of the Atlantic Flyway” and “Herring Run.”

Despite this productive professional and civic life, Elliott’s greatest passion was for his family. He coached his daughters’ softball and basketball teams and marked up scores of high school essays on the hunt for split infinitives and sharp ideas. He showed up for his daughters always. When Priscilla graduated from Williams College on the same day that Sarah graduated from Nauset Regional High School, Elliott tracked down a friend with a pilot’s license and convinced the friend to fly him across the state so that he could be at both events.

Elliott loved to dole out advice — often long-winded but always heartfelt. And he often said that, if nothing else, he hoped to be remembered someday as a “wonderful father of daughters.”

Elliott leaves behind those daughters, Priscilla (Jay), a physician of East Montpelier Vt., and Sarah, a journalist of New Rochelle, New York and Brewster. He also leaves behind Susan, his wife of nearly 60 years and the most devoted of caregivers during Elliott’s long struggle with Alzheimer’s; four beloved grandchildren to whom he will always be remembered as “Boppa” (Elliott, 14; Petra, 11; Christopher, 11; and Alma, 8); his brother, Robert (Darden) of Chicago; and numerous nieces, nephews and cousins. Elliott was preceded in death by his brother, Norman (Carolyn) of Washington D.C.

A celebration of life will be held at the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History, Route 6A, Brewster, MA on September 19th at 2PM.

Donations in Elliott’s memory can be made to the Brewster Conservation Trust. Or get outside and remember him while enjoying a good walk.