Harvey Locke Carey

Background

Carey was one of three sons and one daughter born to attorney Gregory William Carey (1882-1965) and the former Willie Belle Locke (1885-1941). Though he was born in Parkin in Cross County in eastern Arkansas, Carey was living at the age of five, according to the 1920 census, in Earle in Crittenden County, also in eastern Arkansas. He was subsequently reared in Paris in Logan County in the western portion of the state. At Paris High School, from which he graduated in 1931, he excelled in football and was a Golden Gloves champion in boxing. In 1930 he was Arkansas Welterweight Champion and later in that year he won the Chicago Tourney of Champions Welterweight title. In 1931 as a middleweight, he again won in the Chicago Tourney. He spent time during summers in a government WPA work camp in Kansas at his father's insistence to learn the value of hard work and persistence. Gregory and Willie Carey are interred at Oakwood Cemetery in Paris, Arkansas. Carey's older brother, PFC William Gregory Carey, was killed in action aboard the HMT Rohna, in the greatest loss of life, at sea, for the American military in World War II.

In 1932, at the age of seventeen, he enrolled for two years at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He was a member of the University of Arkansas Football team. In January 1933 Carey wed before a justice of the peace in Stilwell in Adair County in eastern Oklahoma the former Katie Elizabeth Drew (1915-1971), the daughter of Harmon Caldwell Drew, judge of the Louisiana Court of Appeal for the Second Circuit, and the former Annie Lucile Grigsby (1890-1974). In 1951, Katie Drew Carey became a real estate agent in her native Minden, Louisiana. Harvey Carey was thereafter engaged in pre-law studies at Louisiana Tech University in Ruston from 1934 to 1936. In December 1934, the young couple's first son, Richard Drew Carey (1934-2013), was born in Shreveport.

Early legal career

A member of the moot court, Carey obtained his law degree in 1939 from Tulane in New Orleans. He was affiliated with Phi Delta Phi honor society and the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity. After law school, Carey joined the prestigious Shreveport firm of Hollingsworth B. Barret (1892-1959). While working subsequently for the United States Army Corps of Engineers, he acquired through the use of eminent domain the land for Wallace Lake Reservoir on Cypress Bayou near Stonewall in south Caddo Parish and the Louisiana Army Ammunition Plant west of Minden, which was activated for World War II ordnance manufacturing.

Military matters

In 1942, at the age of twenty-seven, Carey enrolled in Officer Candidate School for the United States Navy at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. While in the Navy, he studied in 1943 at Princeton University in Princeton. He was the first commanding officer of LCI 466, this being from 22 September 1943 until 16 October 1943.

For severe injuries sustained during maneuvers off Chesapeake Bay, Carey received the Purple Heart. For six months he recuperated at Bethesda Naval Medical Center. During 1944 and 1945, as a lieutenant he was executive officer of the Navy's amphibious training base at Galveston, Texas. His last military assignment was as a legal officer on the Pacific island of Guam in the Marianas Islands. In preparation for the 1945 flight of the Enola Gay over Hiroshima, Paul Tibbets spent time on Guam and on nearby Tinian at the same time that Carey was stationed in Guam.

A brother, Private First Class William Gregory "Bill" Carey (1913-1943) of Paris, Arkansas, was one of 1,045 Americans killed at sea in the sinking in the Mediterranean Sea of the HMT Rohna. After his active military service, Carey was a lieutenant commander in the Navy Reserve. Carey was long active in the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and Disabled American Veterans. He was commander of the Shreveport contingent of the congressional-chartered Military Order of the Purple Heart, which disbanded after the death of all its members. For three years during the 1950s, he was the MOPH state commander; for a year he was a national MOPH vice-commander.

Law and politics

After the war, Carey became an oil and natural gas attorney in Shreveport; one of his principal clients was William C. Feazel, the interim U.S. senator appointed in May 1948 upon the death of John H. Overton. Late in 1947 and early in 1948, Carey was the northwestern Louisiana campaign manager to return Earl Kemp Long to the governorship for his first full term to a position which then paid $12,000 per year. In a runoff election, Long handily defeated former Governor Sam H. Jones of Lake Charles to succeed the first of the two terms of Jimmie Davis. Later in the same year, Carey and former State Senator Lloyd Hendrick of Shreveport ran unsuccessfully for the United States House of Representatives for Louisiana's 4th congressional district. The pair was defeated by the popular incumbent Overton Brooks of Shreveport, a nephew of John Overton, who subsequently died in office in 1961. In the 1948 fall campaign, as a member of the Caddo Parish Democratic Executive Committee, Carey worked unsuccessfully to carry Louisiana's then ten electoral votes for U.S. President Harry S. Truman, who lost the state to the official Democratic nominee, Strom Thurmond, then the governor of South Carolina. He also worked successfully in Russell B. Long's northwest Louisiana general election campaign for a partial term in the U. S. Senate against the Republican Clem S. Clarke, a Shreveport oilman.

Carey's support for the Longs was in contrast to the stand of his father-in-law, Judge Harmon Caldwell Drew, who had spoken out against Huey Pierce Long, Jr., in a public meeting in Minden in 1933. Drew was the president of the interest group known as the Louisiana New Deal Organization, an association committed to promoting the New Deal domestic policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

From 1948 until 1950, Carey was the clerk of the Louisiana House of Representatives; his former brother-in-law, R. Harmon Drew, Sr., subsequently served in the House as the member for Webster Parish from 1972 to 1978. Also in 1948, Carey was a special state attorney general under Bolivar Edwards Kemp, Jr.

United States Attorney

From August 29, 1950, to January 24, 1952, Carey served as the Truman-appointed U.S. Attorney for the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, based in Shreveport. His tenure as U. S. attorney at a stated salary of $7,800 annually, was sandwiched between the resignation of Malcolm Lafargue, who stepped down in May 1950 to challenge Russell Long in the Democratic primary for the full six-year Senate term, and William J. Fleniken.

Judicial campaign

After his time as U. S. attorney ended, Carey resumed the practice of law in Shreveport. He resided on eighty acres off Wafer Road in Bossier Parish, since turned into a subdivision. On July 23, 1960, he ran unsuccessfully for the Division A judgeship of the Louisiana 26th Judicial District, which encompasses Bossier and Webster parishes. The position opened when James E. Bolin was elected to the Louisiana Court of Appeal for the Second Circuit. Carey lost to O. E. Price of Bossier City.

Personal life

Carey's older son, Richard Drew Carey, a 1952 graduate of Minden High School and thereafter Louisiana Tech, first worked abroad for a number of years and in New Orleans before he returned to Minden in 1971 to become a broker at the real estate agency established by his mother. With his wife, the former Joyce Lou Humphries, Richard Carey developed nine subdivisions in the Minden area. He was involved in the development of Louisiana Highway 531 and the Interstate 20 frontage road in Minden. He donated the land along the service road for the site of the new campus of Northwest Louisiana Technical College. He was instrumental in the development of the nearby Minden Recreational Center. From 1998 to 2000, he was a member of the board of Minden Medical Center. A community civic leader, he was a member of the Louisiana Archaeological Survey and Antiquities Commission. Unlike his father, Richard Carey was a Republican. He died of heart disease in 2013, a few days prior to his 79th birthday. He has a surviving son and daughter.

Harvey and Katie Drew Carey had two other children, who like their older brother were born in Shreveport and graduated from Minden High School. Katie Elizabeth Drew finished Minden High School in 1931 and her brother Harmon Drew finished in 1933. The dermatologist Thomas Drew Carey (born 1947) of Ruston, is a member of the first graduating class in 1973 of the LSU Health Sciences Center Shreveport, who has carried forward his father's interest in veterans causes. Katie Lucile Carey Sims (born 1948), a graduate of the University of Louisiana at Monroe, is a businesswoman in Houma in Terrebonne Parish in South Louisiana.

From 1956 until her death at the age of forty-six in 1967, Harvey Carey was married to the former Nellie Deatherage. The couple spent two months a year camping at Yellowstone National Park and were present during the 1959 Hebgen Lake earthquake in southwestern Montana. Carey penned an article about their experience in the disaster for Outdoor Life magazine, but no copy of the manuscript is readily available. After Nellie's passing, Carey lived in a camp house that he constructed himself on Kepler Lake near rural Jamestown in Bienville Parish in north Louisiana. An avid fly fisherman and camper, and died of cancer ten days before his 69th birthday. He and Nellie are interred at Hill Crest Memorial Park in Haughton in Bossier Parish. First wife Katie Carey is interred with other Drew family members at the historic Minden Cemetery.