Posted on 12/29/2020 11:37:42 PM PST by nickcarraway
Morgan Freeman picked up his bullhorn and baseball bat to star in the 1989 Warner Bros. movie. Joe Clark, the uncompromising New Jersey high school principal who employed a bullhorn and baseball bat to round his students into shape en route to becoming the subject of the inspirational Morgan Freeman film Lean on Me, has died. He was 82.
Clark died Tuesday after a long illness at his home in Gainesville, Florida, his family announced.
Soon after taking over as head of Eastside High School in Paterson, New Jersey, Clark expelled 300 students for fighting, vandalism, abusing teachers and drug possession — in one day — and challenged the kids that remained to perform better.
"I don't just categorically extirpate young people out of school, but I am categorically emphatic that we cannot any longer condone hooliganism, aberrant behavior and deviant behavior in those schools," Clark said in a CNN interview. "I'm convinced that young people, the vast majority, deserve the right to an environment that's conducive to learning."
Roaming the hallways with a bullhorn and baseball bat, Clark won admirers as well as critics. He explained that the bat was not a weapon but a symbol of choice: a student could either strike out or hit a home run.
Clark declined an offer from President Reagan to serve as a White House policy adviser, appeared on 60 Minutes and The Arsenio Hall Show and was featured on the cover of Time magazine (with a baseball bat, of course) as Lean on Me hit theaters. The 1989 Warner Bros. release, directed by John G. Avildsen of Rocky fame, was made for about $10 million and grossed nearly $32 million, according to Box Office Mojo.
In a 1989 interview, Freeman, who played Clark in the movie, called the principal a "charismatic magician" and noted that during the making of the film, the educator "got up in front of the students and said, 'You know, they're going to be making the picture, and we are the stars. So let's give them every help we can.' And by George, that's what they did."
Clark retired from Eastside High in 1989.
Morgan Freeman in 'Lean on Me' (1989) Warner Brothers/courtesy Everett Collection Morgan Freeman as Joe Clark in the 1989 film 'Lean on Me' Born in Rochelle, Georgia, on May 8, 1938, Joe Lewis Clark and his family moved to Newark, New Jersey, when he was 6. After Newark Central High School, he received his bachelor's degree from William Paterson College, his master's from Seton Hall University and an honorary doctorate from the U.S. Sports Academy.
A stint after college as a U.S. Army reserve sergeant and drill instructor engrained in him a respect for order and achievement.
Clark served as a Paterson grade school teacher and the director of camps and playgrounds in Essex County, New Jersey, then was hired as principal of PS 6 Grammar School, a failing school that he transformed into what his family called the "Miracle of Carroll Street."
After Eastside, Clark worked for six years as the director of Essex County Detention House, a juvenile detention center in Newark. He also wrote the book Laying Down the Law: Joe Clark's Strategy for Saving Our Schools, published in 1989.
Survivors include his three children: Joetta Clark Diggs, a four-time Olympic track athlete and businesswoman; Hazel Clark, a three-time Olympian and director of sports business development for the Bermuda Tourism Authority; and Joe Clark Jr., director of track and field and cross country at Stanford University; and his grandchildren, Talitha, Jorell and Hazel.
oh no RIP Principal Clark.
More than anything else I believe that this is the key to success or failure of a school. That and enforcing standards.
One of the things that I thought they got right in that film was the portrayal of the Mother of the drug dealing teenager that insisted that he had a right to be in the school regardless of his behavior.
She was a troublemaker in front of the school board and knew how to make trouble for a reforming principal.
She portrayed a Leftist very well.
Joe Clark retired in 1989. Twenty-one years of retirement. Not bad.
Thirty one. Did we ever know why he didn’t want to consult for Reagan’s White Hoise?
“Joe Clark retired in 1989. Twenty-one years of retirement. Not bad. “
At Joe Clark’s school, he would have required that you know that 2020 - 1989 = 31 before graduation.
Lean On Me was a great movie, which of course was based on a true story.
Welcome to the Jungle was an excellent song to showcase the anarchy Joe Clarke would be entering.
I didn’t have the benefit of going to his school.
Give me a break it’s after 3 in the morning
;)
Today, that is all overlooked if a certain percentage of those expelled are from a certain group.
It would be called "disproportionate punishment", and all 300 of those hoodlums would go right back in the classroom.
That was the late, great Lynne Thigpen.
Make that 31 years of a retirement
Sounds like he raised great kids..........
Raised TWO Olympians??? Wow!!!
Lynne Thigpen played that role perfectly . . she dies pretty young unfortunately. She was also the unseen DJ in The Warriors.
The whole cast had plenty of heft too. Robert Guillaume was great and Beverly Todd as the Assistant Principal was too.
Todd and Freeman were also husband and wife in The Bucket List and she had a very lengthy career, which is still going at age 74.
Michael Imperioli is one of the kids early in the movie on the stage that got expelled:
Fare thee well, Old Joe Clark.
RIP.
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