Carroll S. Jackson, a retired banker and World War II and Korean War veteran, dies

Carroll S. Jackson, a retired First National Bank official and a veteran of World War II and the Korean War, died June 13 of complications from COVID-19 at Gilchrist Center in Towson. The longtime Poplar Hill resident was 97.

Carroll Shattuck Jackson, son of Charles Shattuck Jackson, a West Point graduate who was the CEO of the Federal Land Bank and the Federal Intermediate Credit Bank, and Edith Carroll Reeder, a homemaker, was born in Baltimore. He was the youngest of three boys and was raised in Roland Park and Guilford.

Mr. Jackson was a descendant of John Jay, a 1774 delegate to the Continental Congress and later a signatory to the Treaty of Paris, the formal treaty with England that ended the American Revolution. Mr. Jackson was also indirectly related to Civil War Confederate Gen. Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson.

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Mr. Jackson attended McDonogh School until an older brother, Charles Reeder Jackson, died. Charles was visiting friends of his parents, who owned a ranch in New Mexico.

“He was riding, got off his horse to look at the scenery and fell off a cliff,” Mr. Jackson wrote in a family memoir. “His death had a tremendous impact on our family.”

Another brother, John, persuaded their parents to transfer them from McDonogh to Gilman School, where Mr. Jackson played varsity lacrosse as a defenseman. After graduating in 1943, he enlisted in the Marine Corps.

“At this time, the Marines were sending their men to the equivalent of a year and a half of college before sending them on to boot camp to be followed by Officer’s Candidate School,” he wrote in the unpublished family memoir.

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“I had to decide immediately which direction I wanted to go in, so I chose civil engineering. I was sent to the University of North Carolina, Duke and the University of Michigan while in uniform. In addition to studying, we had many military duties.

“Shortly after we had gone to boot camp at Parris Island and later received our commissions at Camp LeJeune, the war ended. We never received our orders to go overseas. It was 1945, and I was free to go to Princeton.”

Mr. Jackson played varsity lacrosse at Princeton, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1948.

It was Mr. Jackson’s thesis at Princeton on the Arabian-American Oil Co. in Saudi Arabia that was his entree into a job in the petroleum industry, which led to an interview with Jacob France, a Baltimore lawyer with deep connections to the old Equitable Trust Co.

“Mr. France was extra-impressive to a young man like me,” Mr. Jackson wrote. “He had also been brought in to rescue an oil company in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Mid-Continent petroleum, and knew a lot about the field in which I was interested.”

But his mentor insisted that he learn the oil business from the bottom up and not from a mahogany-paneled office.

“As a result of that conversation, I spent the next year of my life working in oil fields in Arkansas, Texas and Oklahoma. On each rig I was one of the five ‘roughnecks’ who drilled the wells. We lived all over in little towns in the Midwest. It was the hardest year of my life — both physically and emotionally,” he wrote.

“I was very lonely because, although the other men accepted me as different because I was an Easterner, they had no idea that I had had a high school education, much less gone to college. They were a hard, tough, an uneducated group, but they knew their business.”

Mr. Jackson wrote that once you started drilling a well, you never left, and if the next shift failed to appear, days could stretch to 16 hours or more. It was dangerous work, made worse by weather, where an arm or leg could be crushed while stacking huge pipes two-and-a-half high atop the rig.

Fights among the workers in the oil fields were a common experience. One day a co-worker came after Mr. Jackson while swinging a 36-inch wrench. His life was spared after another worker intervened.

While working in the oil fields, Mr. Jackson remained a Marine Corps reservist, and in 1950, with the outbreak of the Korean War, he was recalled for active duty. After taking refresher courses at Quantico, he received orders to go to Korea as a lieutenant, when, as fate would have it, a Gen. Linscott summoned Mr. Jackson and offered him the job as his aide-de-camp.

At the time, “Many lieutenants in Korea did not return home,” Mr. Jackson wrote.

Mr. Jackson was discharged in 1952.

“General Linscott probably saved my life. To me, he was the smartest, fairest most able, most understanding — even kindest — military man possible,” he wrote.

After returning to Baltimore, Mr. Jackson began a 38-year banking career, starting in 1952 as an assistant cashier with the old First National Bank. He was a graduate of the Rutgers Graduate School of Banking and in 1957 was promoted to an assistant vice president. He was senior vice president at his 1990 retirement from the bank.

In 1957, he married the former Patricia Davis, and after living in Armagh Village, near Rodgers Forge, they settled into a home on Bellemore Road and Winding Way in Poplar Hill, where they raised their three children.

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The couple later separated but never formally divorced; they remained amicable and friendly, family members said. Mrs. Jackson died in 2009.

Mr. Jackson’s board memberships included the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, what is now Franklin Square MedStar Medical Center, The Lyric Foundation and Hampton National Historical Site. He was chairman of the board of the Maryland Eye Bank — now the Tissues Bank International — for two decades.

In recent years, Mr. Jackson resided at Buckingham Manor in North Roland Park. He enjoyed playing tennis and traveling. He was a member of The Elkridge Club for 76 years and was also a member of the Maryland Club.

Mr. Jackson and his companion of many years, Ann Carter Stonesifer, were both avid travelers and visited London, British Columbia and Bermuda, in addition to visiting Ireland 37 times since 1998, family members said.

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Ms. Stonesifer died in 2017.

Mr. Jackson had been a communicant of the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer. A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. June 29 at St. David’s Episcopal Church at 4700 Roland Ave. Mr. Jackson grew up at the church, family members said.

Mr. Jackson is survived by two sons, Thomas C. “Tim” Jackson of Ruxton and Clay S. Jackson of Palm Bay, Florida; a daughter, Edith “Edie” Jackson Small of Lutherville; and four grandchildren.