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The Venerable Roy Clark

Claremore o ers a tribute to this lauded musician, singer and honorary Okie.

As far as country-music impresario Jim Halsey is concerned, the city of Claremore is a perfect place for an exhibition on his famed client and friend, Roy Clark. After all, Clark not only deeply admired Claremore’s favorite son, the celebrated Will Rogers; he was also, in 2005, grand marshall of the town’s annual Will Rogers Days parade.

“Roy was a big, big fan of Will Rogers,” explains Halsey, Clark’s longtime manager. “And he got to ride in the parade for Will, so there’s a real connection there. Plus, I don’t know of two more

The late Roy Clark is remembered at the J.M. Davis Arms and Historical Museum in Claremore. File photo loved and respected Americans than Will Rogers and Roy Clark. What two people pair up better? at’s America, buddy.”

It’s also Claremore, now that the city’s J.M. Davis Arms and Historical Museum has opened its exhibit, e Story of Roy Clark, a little more than a mile away from where the Will Rogers Memorial Museum has long stood on a hill, overlooking the town. e latter is the permanent repository for Rogers’ artifacts, while the Clark exhibit at the Davis Museum is scheduled to last “about a year,” according to Halsey, who works out of his o ces a couple of dozen miles down the road in Tulsa.

For decades, Clark was also a T-Town resident, and Halsey notes that e orts are underway to nd “a permanent home” for the collection in their shared hometown. In the meantime, he says, “We have all this memorabilia that we need to do something with. So, what better place to do it than in a state-of-theart exhibition space in Oklahoma? is gives Tulsans and people from the Tulsa area an opportunity to renew their acquaintance with Roy through physical objects – posters and albums and guitars and clothing, awards and citations. ey can see all the contributions this man made, not only to

American music and American entertainment, but speci cally to Tulsa and the whole Oklahoma area.” Visitors will indeed nd an intriguing array of Roy Clark material in the Davis Museum exhibit, from a pair of overalls and a banjo that he used during his long run on TV’s Hee Haw to custom and antique ri es to a special trading card. at latter item particularly delighted the museum’s executive director Wayne McCombs, a well-known baseball expert who’s written extensively on the subject.

“We’ve got the bubblegum card [from 1961] celebrating the 565-foot home run that Mickey Mantle hit at Gri th Stadium in Washington, D.C.,” McCombs notes. “Roy saw him hit it. He was in the stands with his dad that day.”

By the time Mantle launched that monumental blast, the Clark family – originally from Virginia – had been living in D.C. for more than 15 years, where his father, a onetime farmer, had found work at the Washington Navy Yard. It wasn’t until the early ‘70s that Clark, by then an internationally known entertainer whose career had been guided for years by Halsey, moved to Tulsa, where Halsey was busy building up his Jim Halsey Company. (By the mid’80s, it would be the biggest country-music agency in the world.) Clark remained a Tulsa resident until his 2018 death, lending his name, presence and talent to – among other local endeavors – a nine-year run of annual Roy Clark Celebrity Golf Tournaments and concurrent Star Night concerts, all bene ting Tulsa’s Children’s Medical Center.

As impressive and star-studded as those events were, they make up only a small part of Roy Clark’s legacy – which is something that the museum’s executive director McCombs and curator Jason Schubert quickly realized when they began looking into the idea of a Clark exhibit.

“It started around anksgiving, when Jim gave me a call about it,” remembers McCombs. “He told me that Roy had a lot of hunting ri es and some antique stu from the Civil War era that we might be interested in displaying. en,

we started talking about Roy’s awards.”

Eventually, Schubert and McCombs visited the Clark home in Tulsa to take a look at some of Roy’s mementos. ere, they were met by Julia Staires, Roy’s longtime o ce manager who, McCombs says, was assisting Barbara Clark, Roy’s widow.

“We started with the ri es,” Schubert remembers. “But as we looked at everything he had and saw just what was there, we said, ‘We really need to tell this story.’ at’s how it began to develop into e Story of Roy Clark.”

Adds McCombs: “We saw those awards and realized that each one of them was a milestone. We thought people needed to see them. So, we asked if we could use them, and they said, ‘Sure.’ Once we had permission, Jason and I started pulling them o the walls and wrapping them in bubble wrap.”

At one point, Halsey asked if they’d like to use any of Clark’s stage costumes.

“We said we’d take a couple,” says Schubert with a chuckle. “He got us six, including, best of all, those Hee Haw overalls.”

Some of the items in the exhibit, including a platinum record (signifying sales of more than a million copies) of his 1969 single “Yesterday, When I Was Young,” will be familiar to even casual Roy Clark fans. Other pieces, however, may o er surprises to the exhibit’s visitors. ere is, for instance, a photo and helmet that re ected Clark’s passion for drag racing. Taken at a track in the Ozarks, the picture shows him and his car, with “Super Picker” emblazoned on the side. ere’s also a section devoted to Clark’s love of baseball – which includes the trading card mentioned earlier. Clark was not only one of the owners of the Tulsa Drillers for many years; he’d been a good-enough player himself to earn a tryout with the St. Louis Browns.

“He really had a lot to do with saving professional baseball in Tulsa, too,” says McCombs. “Back in 1979, they needed a new stadium. Roy put together a telethon, on Channel 2, that raised $106,000 toward that goal. And he was part-owner of the Drillers from ‘77 until after the ‘82 season.”

Yet, while McCombs is proud of the baseball component, his favorite part is the videohighlight reel put together for the exhibit – especially the footage of Clark’s character Myrtle Halsey (the last name was no accident) on e Beverly Hillbillies TV show.

“I remember back when I was a disc jockey [on radio station KVOO], visiting with Roy and telling him how I watched him on e Beverly Hillbillies with my family, when I was growing up,” McCombs says. “He told me that he’d gotten his rst screen kiss, from [his co-star] Donna Douglas, when he was playing Myrtle Halsey.”

While McCombs had the opportunity to meet and visit with Clark – along with spinning his records as a deejay – Schubert knew Clark mostly through Hee Haw, which remained a popular syndicated program for decades. Now that he’s had a chance to look more deeply into Clark’s career, he admits to being “amazed” by the man.

“I didn’t realize the extent of musical talent that Roy Clark had,” he says. “I didn’t realize how tremendous of a musician he was – what a great talent he was.”

McComb adds: “When we went to his home, and got to see all his awards – well, it was unbelievable. All these awards, for years and years and years. And then, all that he gave back. e charity golf tournaments and the Children’s Medical Center and all that. It was just fantastic. He didn’t have to do that. He was already a welcomed, accepted Okie. But he kept going and going. He really was an amazing individual.” at evaluation isn’t only shared by the J.M. Davis Museum’s curator and executive director; it’s also re ected beautifully in their new exhibit – a tting tribute to one of Oklahoma’s all-time great adopted sons. JOHN WOOLEY 2021

EOOMS welcomes Dr. Chris Ray