Thomas D. Clark, Kentucky's Historian Laureate, Turns 100 Monday

Lexington, KY, Herald-Leader ^ | 07-13-03 | Jester, Art

[Theodore R.]

MAN OF THE CENTURY Kentucky's historian laureate celebrates a special birthday By Art Jester HERALD-LEADER STAFF WRITER

Tomorrow is not a state holiday, but maybe it should be.

Thomas D. Clark, Kentucky's beloved historian laureate, will be 100 years old.

"I've lived a full life," Clark said recently, in one of his greatest understatements.

The truth is, Clark has crammed into his 100 years enough for several productive lifetimes.

"There was never a moment to stop," he said. "There have been just too many things that needed to be done."

Most of all, Clark has been the eloquent voice of Kentucky's past and its aspirations for the future.

"He is the heart and soul of this state," said former University of Kentucky President Otis A. Singletary, Clark's fellow Mississippi native and historian.

Many of Clark's accomplishments have occurred at UK, where he spent almost his entire career, from 1931 to 1968. He established himself as the authority on Kentucky history and one of the nation's leading scholars on the post-Civil War South and the American frontier.

He also became known as the father of the state archives, the University Press of Kentucky and the modern UK library, especially its collections of rare and valuable historical materials.

In 1994 Clark joined forces with Libby Jones, wife of former Gov. Brereton Jones, to get approval and funding for the Kentucky History Center in Frankfort.

Although Clark has been a prolific scholar, writing or editing 32 books, he is not a cloistered ivory-tower type.

Over the years, Clark has been outspoken on several political issues, such as education reform, the need for a new state constitution and environmental protection. Of late, he has been prominent in FLOW (For Local Ownership of Water), a group of residents trying to oust the publicly held company that owns Lexington's water system to bring it under local control.

Clark has taught or influenced several generations of Kentuckians who have shaped the state's destiny.

One is former Gov. Edward T. "Ned" Breathitt, who puts Clark "at the top of the list" of people who influenced his career.

"He helped me formulate in my own mind what we should do for Kentucky," Breathitt said.

These ideas became accomplishments in Breathitt's administration, especially in education and historic legislation to restrict strip mining of coal.

Taken together, Clark's respected scholarship and political stands have earned him considerable influence.

"He's Kentucky's premier public intellectual," said Robert Sexton, executive director of the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence. "He gives the impression that he was present at almost everything he talks about."

That's how Patsy Todd, wife of UK President Lee Todd, remembered the Kentucky history course she took from Clark 35 years ago. "I felt like I was walking with Daniel Boone right through the forest."

Clark speaks without notes, and he builds a story line brimming with characters, action, details, humor and anecdotes.

The excitement of Clark's lectures is a bright memory for Edward M. "Mac" Coffman, a retired military historian whom Clark called his finest graduate student.

"His lectures had a touch of wit, a touch of poignance, but they were always exciting," Coffman said.

Link to the past

Kentuckians are honoring Clark's birthday with numerous events, including one last week when a book of essays, Thomas D. Clark of Kentucky: An Uncommon Life in the Commonwealth, became the 3 millionth volume in the UK libraries.

Still, Clark likes to downplay the milestones.

"I never gave that a thought," he said about reaching 100.

Recently, though, he's found some time for reflection.

This reminiscing has led to a desire to return to the year and place of his birth, 1903 in Louisville, Miss.

"I would like to spend a month in 1903 and really sense, feel, touch and smell the contrast of the times. No one in my country had ever seen an automobile. There was no bank, no place to sell cotton, no railroad, no telegraph line.

"We died of consumption, pellagra and hookworm.

"We knew how to live on the land. We were more enduring."

Clark's family was blessed with longevity.

His father, John C. Clark, died three days short of 80. His mother, Sallie Jessie Bennett Clark, lived to 96.

Three of his siblings are living: Wilma Clark Sanders, 90, Ethel Clark Atkins, 89, and Ernest Clark, 96.

Two are deceased. Marvin Clark died at 93 and Ervin Clark at 65.

The Clarks owned and lived on a cotton farm. By the standards of their time and place, they were middle class, but life wasn't cushy.

"Growing cotton is a hard way to make a living," Clark said. "We made just enough money to get by on -- and a lot of people didn't make enough money to get by."

He learned early the necessity of hard work. One of his jobs was splitting logs into fence rails. "I split more rails than Abraham Lincoln ever dreamed of splitting," Clark said.

Growing up, young Tom Clark read newspapers "religiously." This reading "opened up the world beyond anything anybody could see in that provincial place," he said.

"You couldn't be born and raised in that country without being aware of the past, because the past was immediate," Clark said.

This intimate link with the past became the material for Clark's colorful works of social history, such as Pills, Petticoats and Plows: The Southern County Store.

Edward L. Ayers, whose book The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (1992) was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, said Clark's book "was a revelation."

"I came across that book and said, 'Whoa! This has the feel of lived life. Here is a book that describes what it felt like to live in that time and place.'"

The presence of the past was also evident in the folkways of racial segregation.

"The paradox of slavery was that individual relationships with blacks was one thing and mass relationships with blacks was another thing," Clark said.

He remembered the time some blacks found strychnine, a poison, hidden by a white man. They put it in his water container.

"The man washed out his mouth and saw it was bitter and spit it out," Clark said.

Then came the backlash.

"They got the black man who did it and hanged him without a trial," Clark said. "It was one of those wild, horrible things. I did not see it, no, thank God."

But white or black, few people had much and farming was always a precarious way to earn a living.

In 1919 the boll weevil "practically devastated our cotton," Clark said. So, at 16, he left home to earn money for his family as a cabin boy on a dredging boat. He earned $30 a month and thought he'd found his calling.

Clark might have left school altogether, had it not been for the superintendent of schools in Weir, Miss.

He spotted the 5-foot-11, 185-pound Clark and recruited him as a guard on the Weir County football team.

After high school, Clark enrolled at the University of Mississippi in Oxford with the idea of studying law.

"Ole Miss was the making of me," Clark said.

The excitement of historical research grabbed Clark and wouldn't let him go.

"It's wonderful to get into the primary sources and discover new information," he said. "These things are thrilling."

Clark applied for and won fellowships to continue studying history at UK and the University of Cincinnati. He flipped a coin, and Lexington won.

His work at UK led to doctoral study at Duke University and teaching jobs.

Then, in 1931, UK President Frank L. McVey offered him a job -- half-time as a history instructor, half-time working to build up UK's library. Clark stayed at UK for the next 37 years.

He built a history department that gained national stature, especially in Southern history. With Clement Eaton (antebellum South), Holman Hamilton (mid-19th century), A.D. Kirwan (post-Civil War South) and Clark, UK had a stable of Southern historians second to none.

Clark ran the department with an iron fist. "Somebody's got to be in charge. If there's not, you won't get anywhere," he said.

Toward the end of Clark's UK career, a few history professors seemed to resent his style of leadership, and thus began one of Clark's few disappointments about his UK years.

When John W. Oswald became UK's president in 1963, he began rotating department heads so no one could get entrenched. Clark offered to resign but instead was booted out as chairman.

Embarrassed and angry, Clark took off to Indiana University to be a visiting professor. He went back to write a history of IU.

But he returned to Kentucky.

"When I finished my work at Indiana University in 1973, I came home. Kentucky was home and is home. You don't have to be born on the soil to love it.

"There's nothing I enjoy more than sitting down with a bunch of mountaineers or at the Governor's Mansion or down in the Purchase or up in Northern Kentucky and listening to people's stories and swapping stories with them.

"I have little or no sadness. I have great happiness about life. It's almost like looking at a mystery story. What comes next?"