Dr. J. Ross Carr was born three miles east of Grand River in 1877, and was an infant when his family moved to Kansas to live for four years in a sod house.

Still a preschooler, Dr. Carr was moved back to Conway, Iowa, where his father operated a weekly newspaper. The elder Carr also produced weekly papers at Hopkins, Mo., Mound City, Mo. and Blanchard, Ia.

Adept in mchanical (sic) skills, Dr. Carr operated a printing press for his father. In that, Dr. Carr served in unmeasurable skill. Even so, Dr. Carr carried scars of a finger mashed in his press operation.

Graduated from Mound City High School, Dr. Carr became a rural school teacher for four years before his desire for higher education was aroused.

He enrolled at Drake University with a teacher's career in mind, but he was graduated in 1907 as a doctor of medicine. He began his practice the same year at Hopeville, Ia., now a crossroads ghost community nine miles southwest of Murray.

Icea Gaumer fell in love with Dr. Carr, some years her senior, when she was a child. In 1912, she became his bride.

Mrs. Carr made her debut as his assistant to the physician at Beaconsfield, where a child suffered a split tongue by falling with some sharp object in her mouth.

The Carrs came to Grand River in 1914, and by 1918, when the first "Spanish influenza" epidemic broke out, Mrs. Carr was a seasoned manager of the doctor's operations. During the epidemic, the doctor showed up for about one meal a day, usually breakfast, at his home. He lived a tense, high strung existence, and when he wasn't using his spare moments to sleep, he developed his great idea for the tatting.

Fifty years of sacrificing service as a country doctor should qualify anyone for some hall of fame, but Dr. Carr became an expert at tatting, and this earned him national acclaim.

Dr. Carr faced up to a challenge from a female post office clerk. From her, he learned simple tatting, but the easy victory was not enough for the doctor; he devised techniques that made most women envious of his skill.

Dr. Carr invented and built a "supershuttle" by which he could handle seven strands of threads, each in a different color if desired, to produce an amazing array of designs in his fancy work.

Besides producing tatted doiles, many of them in original designs, Dr. Carr, when nearing eighty, had designed some tatted baby booties, a startling display of unusual knot tying.

The Carrs had three children: Adrian B. (Killed in Germany in W. W. II), Jim A., Jr. of ..... and Mrs. James Harryman of .... There were eight grandchildren.