William "Bill" P. Carr Jr.

Bill passed away peacefully on a beautiful Sunday morning on the 1st Day of the Jewish Passover 2025 and the 1st Day of Christian Holy Week, Palm Sunday 2025. He had a remarkable expression of love and joy in his eyes, the look of someone being reunited with the love of his life, his beloved wife Peggy of 63 years, who predeceased him on December 1st, 2023.

Today October 29th, 2025 would have been his 98Th birthday. Bill or “Billy” as his sister’s Nancy and Marcia and his Mom, Dottie affectionately called him, was passionate about the outdoors. At Yale University his favorite pastime was trips with the Yale Outing Club which took him all over New England for hiking, skiing and water sports which always involved good food and good friends. Later he traveled out west to the Seattle area, where he studied Economics and Russian Studies at the University of Washington from 1950-1953. He was a member of the Seattle Mountainiers. He loved to join in on their adventures on the magnificent and glaciated 14,000 footer Mount Rainier.

In 1960 Bill met Peggy at the CIA during the height of the Cold War with Russia where they both were employed after their respective graduate studies. Their first date was the snowy evening of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. Both Bill & Peggy grew up in Toledo, Ohio, where they were born eight years apart in the same hospital. Their grandmothers shared a back fence.

After their marriage in 1960, Bill continued his career at the CIA as a senior analyst and expert in Russian energy and transportation resources. Bill & Peggy focused a lot of their attention on their children Peter and Molly who were born in 1962 and 1965. Bill’s passion for outdoor adventures, found a new focus—whitewater kayaking and canoeing, a little-known sport in the mid-1950s. Bill was a founding member of the Canoe Cruiser Association in 1956, which supported the beginnings of many future World Champion Racers and Olympians in the 1970-90’s. The club offered kayak and canoeing instruction, river trips, training sites for racing and sponsored downriver and slalom whitewater races. Bill was perhaps the club’s most devoted instructor in the 1970’s and 1980’s, teaching whitewater technique to hundreds of people.

Bill and Peggy often took the family on outdoor adventures (hiking, skiing, kayaking) in the U.S., England, and in Europe. Later in life, Bill and Peggy traveled to more than 30 countries: they loved Eastern European countries with their unique histories and complex multi-culturalism such as Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Georgia and the Middle East, including Turkey (multiple trips) and pre-civil war Syria (2011). They traveled “off tour” with small backpacks, wearing friendliness, often walking from town to town or taking a local

bus. They made many long-lasting friendships on these trips, and they made many other friends through their other activities, including their shared love of opera. Peggy and Bill loved spending time with family and cherished their four grandchildren, Kat, Antonia, Elena and Andre.