LEWISTON – Just a week before Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969, the longtime president of People’s Savings Bank died at the age of 85.

William “Bill” Carrigan, a banker who had served on the city of Lewiston’s Finance Committee and on the local Draft Board during World War II, was a well-known figure around town, a respectable scion of the business community for many decades.

At one point he co-owned a chain of movie theaters and vaudeville stages across New England. When he sold them after a few years, Carrigan became a wealthy man.

But that’s not why the Lewiston native is still remembered.

In his younger days, “Rough” Carrigan played catcher for the Boston Red Sox with “steel-blue eyes and a fighting jaw,” managed the team to two consecutive World Series wins and signed Babe Ruth to his first big league contract.

Ruth, a pitching stalwart for the Sox before he began slugging home runs for a rival team in New York City, roomed with Carrigan on the road and once declared him the best manager he ever played for.

Carrigan is enshrined in the Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame, and years after he retired from baseball was cited in 1946 on the Honor Rolls of Baseball for his managerial record.

When a reporter told Carrigan of his selection for the honor in Cooperstown, New York, he responded, “Well, well, that’s fine. Thank you. I’ve got to get back to the bank.”

EARLY LIFE

The son of a grocer, Carrigan was born in 1883, the youngest of three children. His parents, John and Annie (McInerney) Carrigan, were Irish immigrants.

John Carrigan enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in Philadelphia at the start of the Civil War and served until it ended in 1865, when he moved to Rhode Island and got married.

After the couple moved to Lewiston in 1873, he worked in the textile business until he opened a grocery store in about 1885.

In his heyday, Carrigan’s father became one of the city’s leading men, hailed on occasion as “one of the smartest politicians of the two cities” astride the Androscoggin River.

He used his political clout to secure a position as one of two liquor deputies tasked with enforcing Maine’s strict anti-alcohol laws.

In 1899, Deputy Carrigan gained public acclaim and private scorn for discovering 26 barrels of illegal beer destined for sale to parched patrons at the state fair, then held annually in Lewiston.

When he died in 1935, one of the last Civil War veterans left in the community, the Lewiston Evening Journal called him a “respected and revered” citizen with a “continuously happy outlook.”

“No man outdid Mr. Carrigan in his patriotism and love of country,” it added. “With him, the flag of the United States was a living symbol of a just and honorable nation.”

Both of Carrigan’s sons loved sports – and had a knack for them. In his time, Bill was widely seen as the best athlete Lewiston High School ever had. He played every sport well, serving at times as a pitcher, catcher and infielder on the school’s state championship baseball team.

During the summer of 1901, only halfway through high school, Carrigan organized and managed a volunteer junior baseball club, where he normally played catcher or second base. He arranged a schedule of games against other clubs around the state, including one in Oxford.

In 1902, the Lewiston Evening Journal reported that Carrigan, captain of the Lewiston High baseball team, had received offers to play for semi-professional teams in Caribou and Houlton.

Carrigan, it said, “is one of the fastest men in the fitting schools of Maine and the team that succeeds in getting him will be considerably strengthened. He is a fine batter, a good base runner, an excellent fielder and is a sure man at his position behind the bat.”

Carrigan was such a “valuable football and baseball man” at Lewiston High that Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire tried to lure him for its teams. He didn’t go.

He almost left Lewiston early that fall for college at Holy Cross College in Massachusetts, but opted in the end to stick it out in Lewiston for the duration of his senior year – a move applauded by Lewiston sports fans and appreciated by an ailing father who needed his help at the store.

In 1904, though, Carrigan was attending Holy Cross, where he gained renown as a halfback on the football field and as a player for its baseball team.

By the summer of 1905, Carrigan was playing summer baseball for a team in Winthrop. He returned to Holy Cross for one more year.

But his future lay with more renowned playing fields with far bigger crowds.

A MAJOR LEAGUER

On June 6, 1906, the Lewiston Evening Journal carried a headline proclaiming “Bill Carrigan For Boston.”

The subhead, which cried out for a copy editor, read, “The Lewiston Boy Brakes into the Major League as Catcher for Americans.”

Before taking the field for the Boston Americans, the team that became the Red Sox, Carrigan finished out a stellar season at Holy Cross. He signed with the Boston team on June 18, where he was expected to help bolster a weak catcher’s slot.

That first year, he played in 37 professional games and got 23 hits, all of them singles. He wasn’t quite ready for the big leagues.

After a year in the minors, he returned to Boston in 1908, joining a lineup that included Bates College alum Harry Lord of Maine.

Carrigan regularly played for nine straight seasons — 709 games in all, almost 2,000 at-bats and a solid record on the field and at the plate.

When Fenway Park opened in April 1912, Carrigan was there. For a time in that era of baseball, it sometimes seemed like he was everywhere, a key element of one of the game’s best teams.

He became famous for his rigor in blocking the plate, his run-ins with competitors and his baseball acumen.

Carrigan caught games pitched by Cy Young, Smoky Joe Wood, Ruth and a host of legends. He tangled with Ty Cobb, but also became hunting buddies with him — and respected him on the field enough to joke that the best way to prevent Cobb from stealing a base was to throw to third when the Detroit Tiger star raced toward second.

Sportswriter Harry Grayson, who saw Carrigan play, wrote that the Lewiston ballplayer “was a man’s man, a ballplayer’s ball player and a pitcher’s sweetheart.”

“Rough Carrigan was one of the most charitable of men, one of the toughest physically. He could lick any man,” Grayson said, “but he didn’t have to. He was a natural leader.”

Carrigan became the team’s player-manager halfway through the 1913 season and continued in the role through the 1916 season.

MANAGER OF BASEBALL’S BEST TEAM

Shortly before the World Series in 1915, the Lewiston Daily Sun weighed in with an editorial.

“God hates a coward, man loves a fighter” the paper said. “That’s why Bill Carrigan, manager of the Boston American baseball club and a son of Lewiston, with his square set jaw and keen mind, flashing eyes and brawn, commands the admiration of baseball fans the world over.”

“Next week he will lead the fight for the title of World’s Champions in a man’s sport, that splendid game of baseball, a grand baseball machine,” it said.

“This combination of players, welded into a working unit in which every personality and ability is a carefully considered part, calls for resource and manhood from its leader,” the Sun concluded.

That team, chock full of stars, made quick work of the Philadelphia Robins, winning the Series in 1915 after losing only one of five games.

Proving it wasn’t a fluke, Carrigan led them the following year to another five-game Series win over, yes, the Robins, now known as the Phillies.

Carrigan still holds the career record as the manager with the best winning percentage in postseason games.

And then, at the height of his success, revered by fans and respected by foes, Carrigan did something rare: He quit.

RETURN TO LEWISTON

Near the end of December 1915, Carrigan slipped into the home of the Rev. C.H. Temple of the First Universalist Church of Lewiston with Beulah Bartlett at his side. Bartlett hailed from a prominent local family and was known as a skilled automobile driver.

By the time they left Temple’s home, with just a few friends in on the news, the pair were married.

Carrigan called the Red Sox afterward to tell them he planned to head south for a secret destination “as he was anxious to enjoy a week of seclusion with his bride,” as the Journal put it.

It turned out he loved his bride more than baseball.

Carrigan said he invested “most of my baseball savings” from a decade on the field in “a chain of movie theaters throughout New England.”

“I felt it deserved my undivided attention,” Carrigan said.

He had also plunked enough money into Lewiston real estate to become one of the city’s larger property taxpayers, the Journal said.

But finances only played a part in his choice to step away from the game.

“He got sick and tired of living out of a suitcase,” his son Bill Jr. told Thomas J. Whalen for his book “When the Red Sox Ruled: Baseball’s First Dynasty, 1912-1918.”

“Jumping all over the country seven months a year to keep up with baseball duties was all right when I was young and unattached,” Carrigan once said. But it wasn’t the existence he wanted as a newly married man with an infant daughter.

“I was tired of baseball,” Carrigan said, and “wanted to spend more time with my family. So I retired.”

BACK TO BASEBALL

A decade later, he agreed to give baseball another shot.

“The next field marshal of the Red Sox will be none other than Bill Carrigan, from Lewiston, Maine, rough and ready Bill, the fighting backstop and dominating baseball leader who led the Boston team to World Series heights of glory in 1915 and 1916,” The Boston Globe declared in December 1926.

Unfortunately, Carrigan’s team, at the bottom of the heap for several years before his return, stayed true to its awful record.

Its Lewiston manager initially took it gently, pointing out no manager can win “unless he has the material to turn the trick.”

For Carrigan, the Red Sox never got that material.

For three years, they just kept losing with a motley collection of players. Only pitcher Red Ruffing shined.

Carrigan eventually soured on the latter-day squad of polite but poor players whom he thought didn’t care enough about winning.

“I’ll take players who get arrested every night and win ball games two out of three afternoons to the best behaved second-division gang ever assembled,” Carrigan told reporters.

Before Christmas in 1929, he issued a statement to the press that he would return to private life.

“If I continued in the baseball business,” he said from his Lewiston home, “I would be compelled to neglect my own affairs to the detriment of my family.”

“It is impossible to handle both and do justice to either, so in fairness to my growing family, I feel that I owe it to them to retire from active service in the game.”

A COMMUNITY LEADER

He spent the rest of his life in Lewiston, where he raised two daughters and a son with his beloved wife, with whom he eventually celebrated nearly half-a-century of marriage.

Carrigan still dabbled in baseball at times, showing up at Fenway Park for old-timers games and the like, and even coached the team at Bates for a couple of years. The Bobcats lost more than they won under his management.

During the Great Depression, Carrigan took an increasingly prominent position as a financial and community leader in the Twin Cities.

He served on Lewiston’s Finance Committee starting in 1940 and the city’s Draft Board when the demands of World War II began scooping up every available man.

Carrigan become a director of the First National Bank of Lewiston in 1939, one of a handful of banking positions he held in later years.

Carrigan was tapped to serve as president of Peoples Savings Bank in Lewiston in 1952 and reelected to the post annually.

Whalen spoke with one of Carrigan’s business associates who explained that Carrigan was careful with the bank’s money.

“He didn’t like to loan money to people because there was always a chance that it wouldn’t be paid back,” the unnamed associate said. As a result, Carrigan had the bank invest in government bonds and other safe assets.

Carrigan remained at the helm of the bank until his death in 1969.

He was buried in Riverside Cemetery. One-time outfielder Duffy Lewis, one of the surviving players of the World Series-winning teams that Carrigan managed, was among the small crowd allowed graveside.

An editorial in the News and Observer, a daily in Raleigh, North Carolina, pondered “how many bank patrons knew about ‘Rough’ Carrigan, who would sit on home plate to block a runner? One wonders how many of Carrigan’s recent neighbors knew he once did the incredible: He defied ruthless Ty Cobb by making it a habit to tag the ‘Georgia Peach’ in the teeth or on the head with the baseball.”

The paper declared Carrigan was “a lifelong study in contrasts” and yet another reason to believe, as philosopher Jacques Barzun once said, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America better know baseball.”

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