Hall of Fame Coach Frank Carey looks back on amazing career

LYNNFIELD – There are so many facets to Frank Carey that it?s impossible to begin in any particular spot.But it is possible to boil down all the diverse elements to Carey?s career into something very simple: He loves the game of baseball, it has loved him back, and there was never anything ? ever ? that he?d have rather done with his life than to be around it.?I probably started to think about coaching when I was in my junior year in high school,” says Carey, an integral part of Lynn baseball history. “I had some great coaches – Mike Carr, Nipper Clancy, Charlie Ruddock, Frank Champa, Jim Brown, all of them real legends – and they all had a tremendous influence on me. So I figured it would be a good career.”To backtrack, Carey, who recorded his 715th win as the North Reading baseball coach this past April, was born in Lynn and spent the first 21 years of his life living in Breed Square. The trip from there to being flown out to Colorado last month to speak before the U.S. Olympic coaches has been a fascinating one.It started humbly enough, with Carey and his friends looking to play any game they could to keep themselves amused.?We were always playing some kind of a game,” he said, “baseball, basketball, football. And we?d be playing home run derby, 3-on-3, rollsies at the bat, where you needed only two people to play. But it was always something.”He was 12 years old on June 27, 1955, when Harry Agganis died, and recalls watching the lengthy funeral as it wove its way through Lynn. All it did was increase his desire to play.He was a right fielder for St. Mary?s (and a left fielder for Connery Post 6 American Legion) when he met the athlete who would become so closely identified to this region through his brief, but spectacular, career with the Boston Red Sox ? Tony Conigliaro.?Tony,” he says, “was self-centered.?Even as a ninth grader, I remember thinking, ?Geez, this guy thinks he?s the second coming of Mickey Mantle?.”Carey was a year older than Conigliaro, and even though there was a slight age difference, Carey became a mentor to him.His favorite Conigliaro story involves another phenom from the era (circa 1962), Danny Murphy of St. John?s Prep.?They were coming to Barry Park on Sunday to play us,” Carey says, “and Tony?s all revved up. He?s got a bat, and he?s swinging it, and he?s saying, ?I?m gonna get that guy. By the time I?m through with him, they?ll be talking about me!??But,” says Carey, “the thing about Tony is that he backed it up. Whatever he said he could do, he did. He hit one to right center that day off Murphy ? it was a real shot.”He says he?s had conversations with other players from the era who swear Conigliaro was a more feared clutch hitter than Carl Yastrzemski, the man who ended up leading that 1967 team to an improbable American League pennant after Tony C was hit in the head with a pitch.Carey, along with Lynn School Committee secretary Tom Iarrobino and Tony?s Pub owner Tony Nicosia – all of whom played with Conigliaro – was a pallbearer at his funeral when he died in 1990.?We were tight, Tony and me,” Carey says. “We used to double date. We went to the prom together.”Although Carey would remain a vital part of Conigliaro?s life up until the time Conigliaro died, he had to leave St. Mary?s in the rearview mirror when he graduated. He went to the University of Rhode Island, where he found his future vocation.?I suppose,” he said, “if my college boards had been a little higher, I?d have been a scientists or a doctor. But judging by what they were, that kind of steered me into this line of work.”So he majored in physical education. And in one of the great ironies, he only got a C in the baseball course he took.?Imagine that,” he said. “I got an A in basketball, and I know nothing about basketball.”When he got out of URI, he went for an interview as a science teacher at North Reading.?Of all things, right?” he says. “What happened is that the AD then, Arthur Kenney, had played pro baseball, but his catc