By Patrick Downes | Hawaii Catholic Herald

Deacon James L. Carroll of St. Anthony Parish in Kailua was a dedicated family man who deeply loved his church, served as a Japanese interpreter during World War II, and won cribbage tournaments. He died on Jan. 22 at age 88. He was a deacon for 22 years.

“I would describe him as very caring, very devoted to his country and to the church,” said his friend of 40 years Barbara Sheer. “The church was his whole life.”

The friendship between Carroll and Sheer, also a St. Anthony parishioner, began when his son James married her daughter Patricia. As a deacon, he baptized the grandchildren they shared — Melanie and Timothy Carroll. Carroll and Sheer also shared grief; James and Patricia both died in 1996.

“He was just a very good man,” Sheer said. “He would do anything for anyone.”

“He really lived his religion,” she said.

James Carroll was born on Dec. 6, 1917, of Irish, English and Hawaiian descent, in Yokohama, Japan, where his father was an import-export merchant. Orphaned as a teenager in Hawaii, he enrolled in Kamehameha Boarding School.

After graduation, he worked as a detective for the Honolulu Police Department. Because he was fluent in Japanese, he was assigned during World War II to keep an eye and an ear on the Japanese embassy on Nuuanu Avenue.

While with the HPD, Carroll met and married his wife Agnes, a school teacher. When an assault by a man left him with impaired vision, he left the force and moved with Agnes to Hilo where he worked for HMSA (Hawaii Medical Service Association), opening the Hilo office above the Hilo drug store.

In 1960, he moved his family to Kailua, Oahu.

Sheer said that Carroll was very involved in his parish of St. Anthony from the start. Among other activities, he began the eucharistic ministry program under then-pastor Father Joseph Ferrario.

Later, as a deacon, Carroll presided at parish weddings, baptisms and funerals, assisted at Mass, and preached.

As a homilist, he was “excellent,” said Sheer. “When he spoke, it was authentic and very meaningful.”

Carroll was a member of the diocese’s second permanent diaconate class, ordained with nine other men on Dec. 4, 1984.

Deacon Carroll also served as a police chaplain with the Kaneohe Police Department, a ministry he continued after he retired as a vice president of HMSA.

Carroll’s oldest daughter, Roberta Garner of Vancouver, Wash., said her father was “full of life.”

“He loved fishing,” she said, particularly spear fishing. She remembers a time he caught a turtle in the days when it was still legal to do so and plastered its shell with the emblem of the Lion’s Club, of which he was a member, and set it loose in Hilo lagoon to advertise the organization.

He was also a champion cribbage player, Garner said, and the winner of cribbage board trophies.

But the Catholic Church, to which he converted as a young man, was his first love, she said.

“He was really — with my mother’s support — married to the church,” Garner said. He attended Mass daily.

“Even when his Alzheimer’s became quite debilitating for him, all he wanted to do was go to church,” she said.

After the disease struck, on mornings when he went missing, his family would find he had taken the half-mile stroll to St. Anthony Church.

When Agnes died in 2003, he moved in with his grandson in Waianae. Because of the advancing Alzheimer’s, the last months of his life were spent in a care home.

His daughter said that while the disease robbed him of the present, his past would sometimes emerge effortlessly. She recalled a time on an airplane when he resolved a communications problem between a flight attendant and a Japanese couple with kids by acting as interpreter.

Carroll is survived by his daughters Patricia Garner of Mililani, Barbara Silva of Rhode Island, and Roberta Garner of Vancouver, Wash., 10 grandchildren, seven great-grandchildren, and his sister Helani Migliaccio.

Bishop Larry Silva celebrated his funeral Mass at St. Anthony Church on Jan. 26. He is buried at Hawaiian Memorial Park.