A musician who had taught himself to play eight instruments, Michael John Carr was part of a Chicago-based touring band accompanying the funk and rhythm-and-blues group Archie Bell & the Drells.
Mr. Carr’s own group, known first as the Bots and later as the Boston Tea Party, played teen clubs around the Chicago area. In 1968, Mr. Carr’s group spent several months touring alongside Archie Bell & the Drells as part of a tour that spanned from Iowa to New York.
“Mike was a jazz guy and always liked to play jazz,” said Bill Waidner, of Northbrook, a fellow Boston Tea Party member. “And he was technically good too. If anything went wrong, he would be down there fixing the amps.”
A Near West Side resident, Mr. Carr, 67, died Friday, April 18, at Northwestern Memorial Hospital of complications from pancreatic cancer, said his brother, Eric.
A man of diverse interests, Mr. Carr also spent about 25 years as a fireman, or the engineer’s No. 2, in the cabs of commuter locomotives for the Milwaukee Road railroad and its successor, Metra. He took a one-year leave of absence from that job in 1970 to move to Chama, N.M., to help convert an unused, 64-mile-long narrow-gauge railroad line into a tourist railroad known as the Cumbres and Toltec Scenic Railroad.
Mr. Carr also owned a men’s clothing store on Oak Street in the Gold Coast for about a decade as well as a three-car limousine service.
Born in Genesee County, Mich., Mr. Carr grew up in Evanston and Glenview and attended Glenbrook North High School before leaving as a sophomore. At age 16 he bought himself a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
Mr. Carr loved drag racing during the 1960s, using a 1962 Corvette and racing on drag strips in Oswego and the U.S. 30 drag strip in northwest Indiana.
A self-taught pianist who could not read music, Mr. Carr began playing in bands while still in high school. Around 1966, he joined a band called the Bots alongside Waidner and another musician, Terry Gates.
The group later changed its name to the Boston Tea Party, performing at small area venues and colleges. In 1968, the Boston Tea Party was tapped to be the opening act and backing band for Archie Bell & the Drells during a lengthy tour of the Midwest and East.
After the Boston Tea Party broke up in late 1968, Mr. Carr and Waidner both joined another band, Four Days and a Night. In 1969 the group was performing at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale when Mr. Carr met Barbara Semitekol, who would become his girlfriend of 12 years. Several months later, Mr. Carr left that band and started a career as a fireman on Chicago-area Milwaukee Road commuter trains.
Mr. Carr soon decided to take a one-year leave of absence from the Milwaukee Road to head out to New Mexico and Colorado to work on getting a tourist rail line up and running. He asked Semitekol to join him, and in the summer of 1970 the pair rode out West in a van. Mr. Carr eventually bought a house in Chama and relished working on and operating the line’s steam locomotives. At the outset, the crew also fashioned passenger cars out of boxcars by simply punching holes in the boxcars’ sides, Semitekol said.
“Mike pretty much packed up and moved up there on a lark,” his brother said. “He had a Lionel train set growing up, and the Cumbres and Toltec Scenic was an oversized train set for him.”
Semitekol said that after about a year working on the tourist line, Mr. Carr was told he had to either return to his job in Chicago or lose it, so he decided to pull up stakes and return to the Milwaukee Road.
“It was a lot of fun,” Semitekol recalled. “We got together with all these other people who were rail buffs who got together, stayed in Chama and decided they wanted to lease that stretch of narrow-gauge line.”
Another of Mr. Carr’s business interests was men’s clothing. Around 1973, he opened a men’s clothing store at 104 E. Oak St. in the Gold Coast called M.J. Carr Ltd. As the disco era boomed, the store became a hit with clubgoers looking for avant-garde garments, Mr. Carr’s brother said. In addition, Mr. Carr loved going on clothing-buying trips to Europe. He operated the store until closing and liquidating it in January 1984.
Also during the 1970s, Mr. Carr ran a limousine service.
After leaving Metra in October 1995, Mr. Carr worked for about seven years for Tramco Pump Co. on the Near West Side before retiring, his brother said.
“Mike had this uncanny mechanical ability to fix anything,” his brother said. “If something was broken or not working, Mike would take it apart, analyze what was wrong and fix it, usually without some sort of manual. He once told me, ‘If it can be taken apart with common tools like a screwdriver or pliers and you can get replacement parts, then it was meant to be fixed.'”
Mr. Carr was estranged from his wife, Gwen. He is also survived by a son, Michael Weldon; another brother, David; and four sisters, Marie Szkalak, Shirley Thomas, Linda Muller and Briget Sanfilippo.
A funeral will be held at 2 p.m. Wednesday at Rosehill Cemetery, 5800 N. Ravenswood Ave., Chicago.
