Granddad's Eulogy

Eulogy for Gerald James Clarke, written by his son Gerald McKinley Clarke at Keswick Ridge, New Brunswick in March 2010

In one of his many personal essays, Wendell Berry wrote about his Kentucky family; the place where his grandparents and great-grandparents lived and “left such memories as their descendents have bothered to keep.” The Clarke family has enjoyed a much more moveable feast, but the following is offered in the same spirit. You can choose the memories you wish to keep about Gerald James Clarke and his family.

Great-granddad, granddad, dad, was born in Toronto in an area that came to be called Cabbage Town. His mother Edith wouldn’t have appreciated this label. Her successful anglophile family lived on the snooty side of the city. She, however, had married a recent graduate of the University of Toronto and the Trinity College Faculty of Divinity, Gerald Campbell Clarke. They already had one son and not much money.

The year was 1920, an historical hinge. The Treaty of Versailles ending The Great War had been in place for just over a year. Looking back, Edith and her mother, called Granny Groosh in the family, had stories to tell about the Victorians and the creation of Canada in 1867. Looking forward, Gerald James and his family lived a narrative dominated by modernism and World War II.

He wasn’t long in Hog Town, another label, this one for Toronto itself, another Edith would not have liked. His father, Gerald Campbell, got his first assignment as a priest in a hardscrabble parish north of Trenton, Ontario. Canada was in the midst of a depression and the area was desperately poor. But there was an extended family nearby in Prince Edward County, a train to Toronto and the wonderful de Gruchy cottage on Lake Simcoe.

The cottage at Jackson’s Point figured large in granddad’s life. As a boy he spent his summers there, learning to swim and sail. Even in old age he moved gracefully through the water and was comfortable at the helm of any boat. This talent played out in many other ways. He loved ropes (lines to a sailor) and knots. In middle age he dreamed of sailing around the world, but satisfied himself with Francis Chichester’ epic voyage in Gypsy Moth IV. Then, much to the distress of his wife and his children he proceeded to read all twenty Patrick O’Brien books about the Nelson-era sailing adventures of Jack Aubry and his friend Steven Maturin. Many a conversation began with sentences such as “Did you know that with studding sails set, the wind abaft the beam and the weather gage. . .?” Perhaps it isn’t fair to blame this didactic streak on his cottage experience, but there is something about the water that calls for precision.

In any case, life at Jackson’s Point was hugely important, the source of life-long stories, while that time in eastern Ontario was short and quickly forgotten. Perhaps it was talent alone, or a bit of luck or just a sympathetic bishop, but Gerald Campbell was soon provided a sizable ministry in Youngstown, Ohio and then a prize; the large and very wealthy Episcopalian community in East Cleveland. His church, Saint Paul’s, was a glorious neo-Gothic structure built in 1845 to inspire the faithful and to keep them from wandering into Methodist or other heresies. It was here that as a young boy Gerald James learned the hymns that he loved and sung until the day he died.

So Cleveland became his home and he led a privileged life, attending Hawkin Day School and then a fine public high school, simply called Shaw. He spoke warmly about this time in his life and in retrospect it was a life typical of many male adolescents, characterized by sports (he was a varsity swimmer) and girls. Probably, not in that order.

The Nazis invaded Poland and Britain responded when he was eighteen. This was the seminal historical moment in his life, the beginning of what he and everyone else in that generation called “The War”. His brother John left the U of T almost immediately and joined a Canadian tank regiment. Edith managed to keep her second son at home. He wanted to enlist, but as a flyer. Instead, he enrolled at Fenn College, now Cleveland State University and here he got really lucky because there was a beautiful girl named Nancy McKinley in a couple of his classes. She needed a ride home. He had a Model A Ford.

Pearl Harbor brought the Americans into the war and took Dad back to Canada. When the US Army Air Force wouldn’t accept him, he joined the RCAF. He trained on bases in Ontario and used his leave-time to return to Cleveland and Nancy. They were married in October 1942 and by the following summer Flying Captain Clarke was in England, piloting a Halifax Bomber with a crew of six. Nancy Clarke was shuttling back and forth, between Cleveland and the cottage at Jackson’s Point, with an infant boy. The nascent family was not re-united until August 1945.
There is a wonderful photograph of Gerald, Nancy and their first child that appeared in a Cleveland newspaper in the fall of 1945. The couple has returned to Fenn College, they are handsome and smiling. The message is clear: despite the pain and suffering of the previous years, the future is bright. And this was precisely true. Both fathers of the couple were dead. John Clarke had been crushed to death in a tank accident, leaving an English wife and infant bereft. Friends were dead or wounded. But there was also good luck. The week the war in Europe ended, the crew of granddad’s RCAF Halifax was scheduled for a rotation of very dangerous bombing runs over Germany. And the optimistic smiles in the photograph? Auspicious! The couple wanted a large family and got it: three more children: two grandmothers ready to help; lots of uncles, aunts and cousins intimately involved in their lives. Children of the depression, they were also looking forward to prosperity and it quickly came their way.

Granddad was not long at Fenn College because he was offered a fine job in the advertising department of the American Steel and Wire Company, a division of US Steel. His wife bundled him off to the Rapid Transit every morning in pressed three-button suits, polished wingtips and a soft fedora. She also picked him up every evening and the family always waited for him to come home so dinner could be eaten together. He was in charge of table manners and clean plates, including the hated brussels sprout. [He reprised this role later in life for the grandchildren that sat to his left at the dining room table in Chappaqua]. Within a decade the junior executive was close to the magic entry point for the upper middle class, an annual salary of $10,000. It wasn’t Ozzie and Harriet, but it was close.

And there were friends, lots of them. With the exception of the very special Anne Blair, who was always just Annie, the close friends were called Aunt and Uncle. The closest were Milt and Betsy Hope in Cleveland, Bob and Wendy Maddock at Jackson’s Point. There were parties that lasted late into the night: martinis at the Hopes, jug wine at Annie’s, beer at the Maddock’s. For some of Uncle Bob and Aunt Wendy’s parties on Lake Simcoe the future great-grand parents would leave Cleveland after work on Friday, stay up almost continuously through the weekend and then drive home on Sunday night. Two lane roads and a black 1950 Ford. Hard to believe.

There was also a spiffy, two-tone 1954 Ford which dad brought home one evening as a surprise. Then a 1956 Ford with a V8 engine and a four-barrel carburetor; the fastest station wagon on the Cleveland East Side. Then a 1960 Ford Station Wagon, a truly crappy car and in retrospect a signal that the high flying ‘50s had really ended. Detroit let dad down first, but then all of corporate America kicked him hard. United States Steel consolidated its advertising in 1962, closed the American Steel and Wire department and fired its executives. Dad was 42. Turns out this was “old” in the ‘60s, at least too old for Cleveland companies hiring new executives. He was out of work for two years.

It was the extended family that rescued him. Nancy’s cousin David Hopwood offered him a position in a newly created food distribution company situated near the Hunts Point Market in the Bronx. Dad moved to New York first, mom followed with the children in the summer of 1964. His work life, however, was never as animated as it had been with the wire company and when Foodco was sold and reorganized he was probably not surprised to be looking again for work. Even after he found a job that he liked, in public relations for Westchester County, it was years until his pride and energy returned. Thankfully, the importance of waste management had to be explained to the public. And it was great luck that the environmental movement was interested in garbage. This is how he found the métier that took him to the end of his working life.

At home the patriarchal fifties morphed into the matriarchal seventies and eighties. Dad took mom to the train and saw her off to her job with Harcourt Brace in Manhattan. He also had dinner waiting for her when she got back to the house in Chappaqua. There was, however, a short period when both of them were retired that they reached out equally to the world. They traveled often, did volunteer work for various community organizations and shared great-granddad’s last project, his Clarke family history. Doing this research he discovered that his family had begun their North American experience in New Rochelle and New York City in the 18th century. They were likely Huguenots and in any case, definitely Loyalists who shipped out with the British in 1783 to the Saint John River valley and what was then the colony of Nova Scotia. His direct ancestors moved to Prince Edward County in Ontario at the beginning of the 19th century. When he brought his family to New York from Cleveland, he closed a circle.

In the last ten years of his life his world moved slowly inward: toward the immediate family, his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, into books and sailing adventures rather than sailing. Even his new passion for cooking changed from grand adventures in the kitchen to watching Emeril. Certainly his health declined. The heart attack that he had at 57 finally caught up with him and led to triple-by-pass surgery. He probably had a series of unrecognized mini strokes before the major seizure that narrowed his focus to the television set in his bedroom. However, everyone’s world constricts as they age and he accepted this without complaint. Then again, maybe it was only to the outside observer that his world seemed so small. Perhaps when he asked for the name of the 1954 star pitcher for the Indians or for details of the 1929 Cleveland National Air races he was actually living in those worlds. Perhaps when his eyes were closed he was flying a bi-wing under roadside telephone wires, or sailing a star-class racer on the lake, or courting Nancy McKinley in the rumble seat of Nicki, the Model A Ford.