Malcolm Bruce Roach
Malcolm Bruce Roach was born in New York City on 15 July 1920. His father, Osbert Croome Roach, was an Englishman who had come to America in his twenties and founded a boys' school at Tarrytown-on-Hudson. His mother, Josephine Sherman Evans, had been born in Chicago. They had married in Manhattan the autumn before. A sister, Mercer Radcliffe Roach, was born in New York on 10 August 1922. She was his only sibling.
The family moved several times while he was small. As a grown man he listed the places he had lived: New York City, Ossining and Bronxville in New York, Greenwich in Connecticut, and Northampton in Massachusetts. They were in Bronxville by the summer of 1927, when the Bronxville Review named him, aged six, in a costume parade. In 1930 the census found them in Greenwich, Fairfield County. The household held his parents, Malcolm, Mercer, a servant named Joyce Harris and a Swedish-born man, R. Oscar Carlson. By 1931 they were back in Bronxville, at 64 Sagamore Road.
His father was a busy man in Bronxville. Osbert was president of the Parent-Teacher Association and chaired the committee that founded the Bronxville Community Forum. He worked in the personnel department of the United States Rubber Company. On Tuesday 4 December 1934 he died at Lawrence Hospital after a short illness. Malcolm was fourteen and a pupil at the junior high school. His mother's father died in Manhattan six weeks later, on 15 January 1935.
His mother kept the house on Sagamore Road. Within a year she was selling life insurance from it, and her advertisement ran weekly in the Bronxville Review through the winter of 1935 and 1936.
Malcolm went through Bronxville High School with the class of 1938. He played basketball at center and baseball as catcher, first on the junior varsity and then on the varsity. He won gold awards in public speaking in 1936 and again in 1937. In June 1936 he was student chairman of a fund-raising committee. In the autumn of 1937 his classmates elected him vice president of the class. He graduated in June 1938 under his full name, Malcolm Bruce Roach. That August the Review-Press reported that he was going to Princeton, as "son of Mrs. O. C. Roach of Sagamore Road." Caldwell Alexander was going to Princeton too.
At Princeton University he was a member of the class of 1942. Classmates called him Mac, and also Coach. He majored in politics. He played freshman basketball and won his class numerals in lacrosse. He served on the Parking Squad. He joined Dial Lodge, one of the eating clubs where Princeton upperclassmen took their meals and much of their social life. He roomed alone as a freshman at 32 Vandeventer Avenue. As a sophomore he shared 12 Hamilton with J. A. D. Banks. In his last two years he roomed with H. E. Stanard, first at 542 Brown and then at 7-A Holder.
By his senior year his mother had moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, and his permanent address was 109 Elm Street there. His entry in the Nassau Herald, the class book, ends with two plain statements: "Roach expects to enter the U.S. Navy. He is a Democrat."
He did enter the Navy, in 1942, through the V-7 program. V-7 took college men into the Naval Reserve and trained them as officers. The Navy's muster rolls carry him at Boston for the month ending 30 September 1942, in a block of V-7 men enlisted at Boston and Springfield. At the end of that year the Office of Naval Officer Procurement at Boston listed him among its inactive V-7 reservists. In December 1942 he was on the student roll of the Class "A" Service Schools at the Naval Training Station, Newport, Rhode Island. In April 1943 the naval hospital at Newport received him from the training station and returned him to it.
He came out of the war a lieutenant (junior grade), one rank above ensign. That is the rank cast on his grave marker. His Princeton class memorial says he served from 1942 to 1946. It also says he was the commanding officer of his vessel at the Normandy landing on D-Day. The vessel is not named.
After the war he went into sales for the United States Rubber Company, his father's old employer. He moved from there to the Dayton Rubber Company as its southwest regional manager. He then went into oilfield supply with the Dewey Supply Company of Tulsa, a business of Dewey Bartlett, and became its president. An oil trade journal of 1957 or 1958 reported that David A. Bartlett had succeeded him as president, after Roach "recently resigned."
His class memorial dates his move to Houston to 1958. From 1962 he worked for Otis Engineering Corporation, rising to vice president of sales and service. He was later senior vice president of foreign operations at BrownHughes Oil Tools. He retired in 1984 and then spent a year working in Egypt. With two Houston colleagues he was named co-inventor on a patent for a well valve, filed in 1980 and issued in 1983. He was a lifetime member of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.
He married Blanche Wynnell Myres, a Texan born at Ennis in Ellis County. It was her second marriage. She had married Grady Wilson in Navarro County in 1938. Malcolm and Blanche had three children, all born in Dallas: Laura Blanche in 1948, James Coleman in 1950 and Wynnell Madison in 1954. They were divorced in Dallas on 7 July 1971.
On 23 August 1975, in Harris County, he married Doris Peterson. Her four children, Cheryl, Richard, Nancy and Patricia, became his stepchildren. Her father died in Houston that October.
Early in February 1993 he was found to have acute myelogenous leukemia, a fast cancer of the blood. He died the next day, 7 February 1993, in Houston. He was seventy-two. He is buried in Memorial Oaks Cemetery, Houston, under a bronze veterans' marker. His sister Mercer died in Houston on 2 April 1993, eight weeks after him.
Sources
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Cite: Heirology, "Malcolm Bruce Roach (1920-1993)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/malcolm-bruce-roach-1920-1993-dac1e8.