Observing a Centennial on the Way to Ours

Lee W. Formwalt and John Dichtl

As we look ahead to the OAH Centennial in 2007, we had the pleasure of recently observing another centennial--the hundredth birthday of our oldest member, Thomas D. Clark. Clark was born in Mississippi in July 1903, and as he recently reminded NPR's Morning Edition host Bob Edwards, "Teddy Roosevelt was president, and I take great pride in the fact the teddy bear, the most popular toy in the world, and I came into the world right at the same time. By the way, the Wright Brothers did their trick, too, a hundred years ago." Edwards introduced his birthday interview with Clark by noting that, "Morning Edition frequently has historians comment on the centennials of important events or historical figures. Seldom does a historian get to celebrate his own centennial." And celebrate he did. An Associated Press story carried the news of Clark's one-hundredth birthday in newspapers around the country and overseas. Celebrations in Kentucky, where he is cherished as the state's historian laureate, kept Clark hopping from one event to another last month.

Tom Clark served the Mississippi Valley Historical Association and OAH in many capacities including vice president (1955-1956), president (1956-1957) and executive secretary (1970-1973). In addition he served on various committees, including program committees (1938-1944), the executive board (1941-1944, 1957-1963), the nominations committee (1945-1947), special committee on the racial question (1954), the AHA-MVHA Textbook Pressures Committee (1961-1966), and the Future of the Association Committee (1963-1964).

We got a chance to talk with Tom Clark a month before his birthday when we visited him at his home in Lexington. What struck us was the energy he exudes. After a two-hour conversation, we got up to head back to Bloomington, but he offered to give us a tour of the University of Kentucky campus, where he had taught many years, and of the new W.T. Young Library. Clark had been a major force in fundraising for the library, which, he told us, would be celebrating on his birthday the acquisition of its three millionth book.

Clark shared with us some of his efforts in the old MVHA and the OAH and at one point he noted that we were bringing back a flood of old memories he had not thought about in awhile. In Kentucky, he's known for his encyclopedic knowledge of the state's history, but not many people there ask him about the MVHA and OAH.

When Clark started attending MVHA meetings as a student in the 1920s, the association's emphasis was in three areas: the western movement, expanding the discipline of American history, and state and local history. And lest anyone think that the OAH's interest in precollegiate education is relatively recent, Clark noted that the MVHA had been interested in "trying to stimulate teachers, especially at the secondary school level, to develop themselves and gain some fundamental knowledge of the content of history and some sense of the movement in history, some sense of the literature, some sense of interpretation and analysis of historical fact and presentation of historical information." MVHA's education committee attempted, in Clark's colorful language, "to influence those cavemen and women who developed curricula for schools to take a close look at the curricula and then the qualification of teachers who were in the classroom dealing with the subject." But "the task was too complex" for the small regional organization.

Clark played an important role in the transformation of the MVHA and MVHR into the OAH and JAH. Getting the names changed was a huge struggle: "Oh, heavens. I went through that bloody battle from start to end." After retiring from the University of Kentucky in 1968, he came to Indiana University at the request of Chancellor Herman B Wells to write what became a four-volume history of IU. The Journal of American History office was already in Bloomington and Clark was asked to help move the OAH executive office here and serve as executive secretary in its new location. Three decades later he still recalls his three years as executive secretary as "trying." Never one to mince words, he recalled the executive board back then as "wooden-headed" and "mule-headed," in obstructing his efforts to create a newsletter for the organization. He finally succeeded in getting the newsletter approved and the first issue published, a going away present from the board to the retiring executive secretary.

Last fall, in a letter to the OAH staff, he wrote that despite his struggles with the board and the difficulties in turning an 1840s farmhouse into the OAH headquarters building, he had "a lot of warm memories and affections for 'OAH' which boiled right up out of an aching stomach ulcer." In a letter to OAH President Darlene Clark Hine, Clark reflected, "Over the past seventy years I have seen the fortunes of OAH waver and rise. I certainly hope its future will be a bright one." So do we, Dr. Clark!

[Quotations are from interviews with Clark on Morning Edition, 14 July 2003 in the OAH Newsletter, November 1999, and from letters he wrote to OAH officers in 2001-2002.]