Although the world outside of our enclave in the mid-sixties was filled with America at it’s best and most horrific, I, like all good completely egocentric adolescence, was preoccupied with the oncoming, unavoidable, and eventual reality of senior lectures with Mr. Clark.

From your first weeks at school, you learned in awe, fear, and sometimes loathing of the power and the glory of Mr. Clark. He was our Senior English teacher, the architect of all truth, grades, and the college application letters.

Throughout my years leading up to the fall of 1966, I was mystified at the power of Mr. Clark. Rumors abounded everywhere. Don’t mess with the man! He can destroy your college dreams. If he liked you he could make you but no one in my immediate world, except my father, did I hold with such trepidation.

One semester my dorm-mate was the bon vivant, world traveler, know it all, speaker of Italian, Thom Steinbeck, the son of the famous John Steinbeck. I can remember one afternoon when the father came to visit the son. The father came slightly early and I sitting alone in my room where he poked his head into the room graciously introduced himself and asked immediately where he could find the famous Mr. Clark.

That did it! If John Steinbeck knew who this man was then all my fears must be true.

Mr. Clark must have had a direct link to Isaiah, Moses, Jesus, and even Shakespeare. He was the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost all wrapped into one human Trinity.

So in the fall of 1965 as my senior year began, classes began in a total blur. All of course, except Mr. Clark’s senior English class.

I must digress for a moment. On these pages in the past I have made it abundantly clear what a wreck of a child I was. Wealth, style and status, were not the problem. Intelligence, graciousness and wisdom were. Up to this time, keeping with good family tradition I was not a reader of much except a good playboy smuggled into my dorm room. Intellectual curiosity was not a high point in my social upbringing (up to this point)…so besides being an emotional cripple, I was an intellectual nitwit as well. Cars, girls and clothes were the makings of a man what lied beneath either were unknown, uninteresting, or too frightening to look.

I can remember my first senior lecture with Mr. Clark as clearly as I remember where I was on that sophomore year day when I heard that President Kennedy was shot. On both occasions a gun went off.

The tradition was that after lunch, while all the rest of the school was in study hall, Mr. Clark would take stance in the refectory. From above like Dumbledore with his magic wand, would commence his hour and a half lecture.

This little, unattractive, mean spirit of a man, would speak the most glorious words I had ever beheld. There would be a stanza of Shakespeare, a sonnet of Frost, and a paragraph from William Goldman’s The Temple of Gold. Working their magic together. The words flowed like glorious, sonorous music to my ears. Without knowing, he was talking directly to me. He was showing me the way out that I had been searching for.

He was beyond wise. He knew what lied deep within the hearts of adolescent boys. For those of us who listened, it became obvious that it was more than clothes that measures a man.

Mr. Clark taught me to read. He taught me to love poetry, novels and the written word. He became my best friend, my true mentor. He awakened me and called me forward from a fitful sleep with a large boom. I woke up from all this “stupid stuff.”

They say one great teacher is all you need. Mr. Clark, may you rest in great peace for you were the one for me.