Philip Carpenter, history teacher at Bay Shore school for nearly 40 years, dies at 84

Whether it was called Bay Shore Junior High School or, later, Bay Shore Middle School, Philip Carpenter remained for nearly 40 years at the helm of Room 808. Officially a history teacher, his students also knew him as a stock market adviser, an advocate for public education and even a philanthropist.

"He was an extraordinary guy," said Kevin Braddish, of Long Beach, a fellow former Bay Shore teacher. "Phil would have an entire unit on the history of the stock market. Sometimes he'd bring the class into the [New York] Stock Exchange itself and show them what the quotes meant. And Phil would purchase stocks and give them to them, either as individuals or as a class. And they would wait a year or two, and by the time they were going to leave [for high school], they would cash them in."

"He gave the best of everything he had to his students" in that racially and economically diverse school, said his daughter, Susan Moore, of Virginia Beach, Virginia. "Long before anybody was looking at DEI initiatives, my father would take the annual reports of big companies and have his students do profiles on who was on the boards of directors — they were a pretty homogenous group of people back then — because he wanted to teach them how the odds were stacked against them if they were not coming from that [background]."

Education, he emphasized, was a way to beat the odds. "He was convinced that public education and public colleges were the great equalizer in society," Braddish said. Carpenter donated regularly to his alma mater, SUNY Oneonta, and established multiple Carpenter Family Scholarships for Bay Shore students to attend SUNY schools.

"It was difficult to share him at times," while she was growing up, Moore said. "But now I understand why. ... All he wanted was to make kids' lives better."

Carpenter died on April 2 of cancer and heart issues at his home in Bay Shore. He was 84.

Scion of a family tracing its Dutch roots to 1653 America, with ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, Philip Moore Carpenter Jr. was born on March 19, 1942, in White Plains in Westchester County. Raised in nearby Scarsdale, the eldest of three children of accountant Philip Moore Carpenter Sr. and Vassar graduate Julianne Acher Carpenter, he graduated from Scarsdale High School in 1960.

'Teacher in the making'

His educational ambitions manifested early: "Teacher in the making" reads the tag on his high school yearbook portrait his senior year. Carpenter earned a bachelor’s degree in education at SUNY Oneonta in 1964 and soon began teaching in Bay Shore, returning to his college during summers, his family said, to earn his education master’s degree. Also during this time he served as a lance corporal in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve.

In 1968, he married Marjorie Jennet "Bonnie" Hall, a nurse at Bay Shore Middle School and later at Southside Hospital, now South Shore University Hospital, in Bay Shore. She died in 2007.

A savvy stock-market investor who did well trading, Carpenter "never lived extravagantly," his daughter said. "He drove old cars, lived in the same house since he bought it and always had two or three jobs. I mean, he never had a summer off: He worked tutoring. He worked for many years for Tommy's Taxi, shuttling people on and off Fire Island. He instilled in all of us a strong work ethic," she said of herself and her three siblings.

Brooklyn Dodgers fan

Both Carpenter and his wife reveled in gardening, growing both vegetables and flowers. The owners of a 25-foot Grady-White Sailfish motorboat, they belonged to the Bay Shore Yacht Club. And Carpenter was a ferocious Brooklyn Dodgers fan who "hated the Yankees because he said they ruined his childhood by pushing the Dodgers out of New York," Moore said, jocularly recalling her father’s hyperbole.

Inducted into the Bay Shore High School Hall of Fame in 2019, he was among the several recipients of the 2018 SCOPE Education Services Community Service Award for his support of such organizations as the Bay Shore Fire Department, the Bay Shore Brightwaters Rescue Ambulance and the Bay Shore Beautification Society.

In addition to his daughter Susan Moore, he is survived by daughters, Jennifer Carpenter Low, of Brightwaters, and Elizabeth Carpenter, of Golden, Colorado; son, Philip Carpenter III, of Manhattan; brother, Robert Carpenter, of Norwalk, Connecticut; sister, Julianne Carpenter Conklin, of Boynton Beach, Florida; and seven grandchildren.

Cremation was private. A celebration of life will be held at a later date. Contributions may be made to the Bay Shore Classroom Teachers Association c/o Carpenter Family Scholarships.