Anthony M. “Tony” Carey was a “quiet leader.”

He was loyal and devoted, humble, a little self-effacing, said Leslie Shepard, a former colleague and friend. He didn’t need to be in the limelight. But no one should take his reservation for weakness, because when something needed to be done, “he just made it happen,” she said.

Indeed, from his work in environmental law to the founding of the Baltimore School of the Arts, Carey did his best to make things happen and to do them the right way — and that is the legacy he leaves, loved ones said.

Carey, who was also a champion for legal ethics, a board member of several local organizations and a frequent traveler, died on Dec. 25 of heart failure. He was 89.

Carey was born on May 31, 1935, to Anthony Morris Carey Jr. and Louise Waterman Carey, and grew up in Baltimore County. His Maryland roots ran deep — his ancestors were faithful Quakers, and his grandmother worked closely with Lillie Carroll Jackson, the prominent Baltimore civil rights activist. Still, he was “unassuming” about his family history, said his wife, Eleanor “Ellie” Carey.

He was the elder of two children and is survived by his sister, Louise Carey-Courpas. Growing up, he shared his mother’s love for horses and came to adore dogs and many other animals, his wife said.

Carey attended The Gilman School, where he was a strong athlete and participated in football, lacrosse and wrestling. He continued playing sports throughout his college years at Princeton University, where he studied history.

He then served for three years as an intelligence officer for the Air Force. Later in life, Carey’s friends would joke that he kept his cards so close to his chest that he could secretly be a spy — so it was very affirming, and funny, when they learned of his intelligence background.

Carey next pivoted to another Ivy League school, earning a law degree from Harvard University, and moved to Baltimore to work as an associate at Venable, Baetjer & Howard LLP. A couple years later, he met Ellie Carey (née Mackey) through a mutual friend. They married in 1967.

Carey briefly left Venable to serve as a state assistant attorney general, primarily working on tax issues, and also advised an ethics commission. After returning to Venable, where he worked on energy and environmental issues, he became the executive secretary of another state ethics board. Meanwhile, he furthered his education yet again and earned a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University.

“Tony was an extremely warm and friendly guy,” said Robert Smith, who worked with Carey at Venable. “Everybody liked him, all the lawyers, all the secretaries, all the paralegals, all the staff — just being around him and joking with him, that was very, very common.”

With clients, he was “extremely straightforward,” Smith said.

In the early 1970s, Ellie Carey decided to pursue her own law career. When she broached the subject with her husband, he was instantly supportive: “Of course you could do that,” Carey told his wife. “It’s not brain surgery.”

Ellie Carey later became Maryland’s first woman deputy attorney general, and in 1986 and 1994, Tony Carey managed his wife’s campaigns for attorney general.

“He would do everything, from handing out pencils in the Dundalk parade to writing my position papers and everything in between,” Ellie Carey said. “He would not have done this himself, but he was really very supportive of me or somebody who would want to run for office.”

Carey was always interested in environmental issues, his wife said, especially after the Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970. He often represented companies impacted by environmental regulations, and while he believed that environmental protections were necessary, he wanted to do so in a way that “wouldn’t make it too difficult for corporations,” Ellie Carey said.

“He would find reaching compromises as a good thing,” she said.

In the late 1970s, he joined the Department of Housing and Urban Development under the administration of President Jimmy Carter as an energy adviser.

At the same time, he helped draft a resolution for the Baltimore City School Board to establish what would become the Baltimore School for the Arts, the acclaimed public high school that has produced the likes of Tupac Shakur, Jada Pinkett Smith and Tracie Thoms. He helped build up the school and became the first chairman of its board.

Shepard, Carey’s colleague and a former director of the school, recalled traveling with Carey in the months before it opened, trying to recruit staff and learn from peer institutions. On one trip, they sat down with the head of an arts school in North Carolina, and Carey asked him point blank: “Who should we get to be director?”

“Leave it to Tony,” Shepard said. He not only got the name of an esteemed arts leader but was able to recruit him to helm the new institution. “He knew how to get the best possible person to lead the school, and the rest got to be history,” she said.

To Carey, the school represented “what children in Baltimore City are capable of that a lot of people didn’t believe,” his wife said. He served on the board, and as president of the school’s supporting foundation, for more than four decades.

Carey returned to Venable again as a partner in the 1990s and left in 2008, when he joined Robert Shelton, another Venable alumnus, to form Shelton & Carey LLP. Carey was known widely for his “good judgment and his fairness,” Shelton said.

“He very thoughtfully would analyze a problem,” his friend and colleague said. “In our relationship, that was the role in which he functioned.”

More broadly, though, Carey was an “adventurer,” Shelton said. His varied career reflected that: In addition to his work as an attorney and for the School of the Arts, he was involved in and supported several other local organizations, including the Lillie Carroll Jackson Museum, the National Civic League and the Bethel AME Outreach Center.

In his personal life, he and Ellie Carey traveled all over the world, including to Russia, India, China, Tibet and Vietnam. “He was curious about other civilizations,” his wife said. They were the outdoorsy type, often skiing, hiking or kayaking.

“He didn’t take a straight and narrow road,” Shelton said. “He sampled various opportunities as they arose.”

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