Story Photos
 Dr. Marion Clark of Longview grows citrus trees in a special greenhouse-like addition he built onto his woodworking shop. Throughout his life, the retired urologist has nurtured interests in music, theater and propagating plants. Bill Wagner / The Daily News
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No slowing down Marion Clark, who understands the art of work
Monday, October 27, 2008 11:35 PM PDT
By Cathy Zimmerman
Printable version
E-mail this articleAs a boy in Kansas in the 1930s, Marion Clark’s daily life was set to the metronome of his grandmother’s sayings. “She couldn’t abide laziness,” said Clark, a retired Longview urologist and not-yet retired musician. While his dad went to medical school and his mother taught school, Clark’s grandparents took care of him.
They warned against the slacker charms of the pool hall and preached frugality and recycling before it was a word.
In the Great Depression, “there was no extra cash,” Clark said. “If one did not have something that one wanted, there was a big incentive to build it or create it. ... The Boy Scouts would haul away junk, and I brought most of it home.”
Seventy years later, Clark’s life seems like a laboratory proof of how durable those lessons were. His memories of skies dark with grasshoppers and house calls his dad made to destitute families are still sharp. But he doesn’t live in the past. He goes forth from it.
At 85, Clark plays in the Southwest Washington Symphony, which he was instrumental in founding. He also plays in the LCC Symphonic Band and in an oom-pah group called the Huffen Puffers.
On acreage in the nosebleed section of Columbia Heights, he propagates 200 rhododendrons and azaleas, including an azalea called Ruth Clark, after his wife. He tends an orchard and vegetable beds, and keeps an orangerie, a greenhouse tailored for citrus trees that hang heavy with Meyer lemons, trovita oranges, grapefruits, limes and Algerian mandarins.
The 10-by-40 foot greenhouse is attached to a workshop, where it can share energy with the space in which Clark is building a vertical viola, sort of a cross between a violin and a cello.
“I see now and then folks who complain about not having anything to do,’ the doctor said. “I just can’t imagine not having anything to do.” He pointed to the couch. “That’s the biggest hazard there is in old age,” he said, pointing to the sofa.
“Longview. That’s where it’s at.”
When Clark’s father was an intern at a research hospital in Kansas City in 1929, “one of his patients was R.A. Long.”
The industrialist asked him, “ ‘Where you going to go, young fella?’ “ Clark’s father mentioned an uncle in Vancouver, Wash., but Long said, ‘You go to Longview. That’s where it’s at.’ ”
“He did come out,’ Clark said. “He checked out Camas and Longview, but things looked pretty dreary.” Back in Kansas, abundant rainfall had led farmers to “plant wheat to beat the band.”
Clark’s father opened his Kansas practice on Sept. 29, 1929. Black Friday was Oct. 25.
“It was a miserable time for my folks. ... But I had enough to eat, which was all I wanted to do,” he said. “I was sheltered, I guess ... My favorite game was bank failure.”
He took piano lessons, which he didn’t like, and played in a brass band, which he did.
By the middle of the 1930s, the land was exhausted, and the dust storms drove across the plains, suffocating entire families inside wood shacks.
When he was 13, his family did move west, to Battle Ground. “The Northwest to me was water, abundant fish and fruit, red raspberries,” Clark said. “I liked it.”
He went to the University of Washington and then to medical school at Case Western University in Cleveland, where he met Ruth, who was studying nursing. In 1951, Marion joined the Air Force, and the couple moved to England, where he was stationed.
In 1953, they settled in Longview and raised six children. Ruth has been as active as her husband, helping to found the nursing program at Lower Columbia College, working for the Red Cross and serving on the Kelso School Board.
Echoing those Kansas days, Marion Clark sums up the philosophy the couple both practiced: “If we wanted to have anything here, we had to do it ourselves.”
Vancouver residents could rely on Portland for cultural activities, he said, but Longview and Kelso had to nurture local talent and build local venues. “There was an underlying pride, that we were able to do that, and not depend on outsiders.”
Clark ran his urology practice until he retired in 1985, but he has never quit making music. Aside from starting the symphony in 1966, Clark threw himself behind the effort to get the city to buy the Columbia Theatre and then worked — as in hard labor — on its upkeep.
Clark said local support of the arts helped recruit physicians and engineers to Longview, boosting the town’s profile and progress. Music and his other hobbies were also mothered by necessity, he said.
“I spent a number of years practicing by myself, so I had to be near a phone,” Clark said. “My poor family was cheated out of vacations, while I chose pursuits that I could do within phoning distance.”
Life in three measures
People in Clark’s age range have a storehouse of experiences, spanning terrible wars, gnawing blight, and sweet periods of peace and prosperity. They’ve adapted to microchips and women’s lib. They’ve watched their children go from infancy to gray hair.
Of course they see the present through the prism of everything they know.
Clark remembers the day in 1934, when at recess he watched billions of grasshoppers sweep across the fields and strip the crops “from horizon to horizon.” But he was never hungry as a child, he said. Only later did his mother’s diary reveal what it was like to feel the dust that seeped through the storm windows and coated the wallpaper.
One time, back in Kansas, his father took him along on a house call.
“It was dusk. He was making a post partum visit to the French community. ... In those days, my mother would pack two bags for him: a bag of tools, and a layette,” because many families “had no diapers, no safety pins or blankets.
“We drove up in the car and the corn crib was sagging. The barn, unpainted, was sagging. Chickens were clucking around in the yard. It was a two-room house, and the lights were off. I stayed in the car, and watched him knock on the door. The glow of a kerosene lantern showed in one of the windows, and he went in to do his ministrations.”
Clark paused to blow his nose.
“The bleakness of that stays in your mind.”
Clark said he recently reacquainted himself with the devastation of the dust storms by reading “The Worst Hard Time” by Timothy Egan and “Next Year Country” by Craig Miner.
He’s not given to emotional or opinionated talk, but Clark said he worries about the current economic crisis, and what it will do to people who live on credit cards, as well as those who think meaningful work ends tidily at a given age.
“I don’t think society can afford to have a person get educated for one third of his life, work for one third, and coast for the last third,” he said. It’s not only finances that challenge people in that final third, he added.
“In my practice, I noticed that most people who made it to their 80s had some gimmick they did,” he said, “and did it religiously. It could be a simple thing they pursue, a daily effort. ...
“I heard the expression one time, ‘You’ve got time to do what you want to do.’ I’ve thought about that a number of times. You have to set your priorities.”
A Fine Cargo: Local people reflect on long life.
A person’s age is something impressive, it sums up life: maturity reached slowly and against many obstacles, illnesses cured, griefs and despairs overcome, and unconscious risks taken; maturity formed through so many desires, hopes, regrets, forgotten things, loves. A person’s age represents a fine cargo of experiences and memories.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “Wartime Writings 1939-1944.” Adapted to change “man” to “person.”
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