ALUMNI PROFILE Cliff Clark ’57
Childhood Passion for Woodworking Remains by Angela Stefano
In the foyer of Cliff Clarke’s ’57, P ’84 Boston home sits a clock: his first major-scale woodworking project. The hands have quit working, he admits, “but the clock hasn’t fallen apart.” “In fact,” says Cliff — speaking with the Academy Journal while taking a break from putting the finishing touches on a solid-cherry credenza — a “big lifesaver” of a project during the COVID-19 pandemic — “I sometimes wonder if I should drag it in the shop, and make some modifications.” Woodworking has intrigued Cliff for nearly as long as he can remember. When he was about six or seven years old, he’d pick up wooden vegetable boxes from the corner store near his family’s home in Boston and figure out how to build things out of them. Later on, he took his hobby to a new level with model airplane kits. “I just really liked everything about working with
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my hands and making things,” Cliff explains, adding wryly, “and ruining otherwise perfectly nice pieces of wood.” Cliff ’s curiosity and imagination grew as he did, but he also describes his teenage self as “just a doofus. I could not focus, was not a very serious guy … When I look back and think about me being 14 or 15 and how little I really knew about anything, it’s almost embarrassing in so much as I just never buckled down and learned discipline.” According to Cliff, a well-respected family friend who had graduated from Lawrence Academy, “recognized that I was going nowhere fast” and facilitated his application to the school. “How I ever got in is one of life’s mysteries,” says Cliff, who spent two years at LA after entering as a junior. But, he adds, “slowly, the lights went on, I developed some skills to tame this crazy brain of mine and focus, and it set me on a course for the rest of my life.”
