4 minute read
Childhood Passion for Woodworking Remains: 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 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.”
“Now, that sounds pretty dramatic,” continues Cliff, “because it is. I would say that, you know, if this were some kind of a computer game and I would pull that module out of my life, I’d be a very different person without those two years. I don’t know where I’d be, I don’t know what I’d be doing, but I don’t think that I would be as comfortable and as spiritually happy as I am now.”
During his school years, Cliff discovered a love of history that came to him as easily as woodworking did. Whereas in English and science courses “a lot of it was just sitting down and forcing yourself to just learn things,” Cliff lit up in his history classes, including a particularly memorable one taught by Jack Burckes. “I just loved that stuff. And unlike the other stuff, I didn’t even have to finish a sentence — somehow, I knew what was going to happen,” he says. Ancient and classic architecture still influences his woodworking projects.
After leaving Lawrence Academy, Cliff earned his B.A. in history, with a minor in art history, from the University of New Hampshire in 1961. A six-month ROTC obligation turned into five years in the U.S. Army as an armor (that is, tanks) officer in Germany and at Fort Knox, and he earned his MBA from Boston University in 1969. The year prior, Cliff joined the Digital Equipment Corporation, where he worked until 1987, becoming a key player in their international business. By the time he left the company, Cliff was its corporate director of international trade.
“It was a very multifaceted job; in a way, it was a dream,” says Cliff, as it gave him a front-row seat to a number of historical moments: the breakup of the Soviet Union, the modernization of China, the fall of apartheid. “I got involved in lots and lots of intriguing situations,” he adds somewhat mysteriously, though he promises that he’s more than happy to divulge plenty of the details in friendly conversation.
In between his time at DEC and his 1996 retirement, Cliff started his own consulting company, working with companies that hoped to establish a presence overseas and representing his clients during trade organizations’ lobbying in Washington, D.C. Prior to the pandemic, he spent plenty of time traveling, too, including undertaking a coast-to-coast walk across northern England — from the Irish Sea on the country’s western edge to the North Sea on its eastern edge — with his wife Nancy and another couple. “You pick up a stone on the beach of the Irish Sea and you put in your pocket, and then when you get to the North Sea, it’s thrown in the ocean,” Cliff explains, adding humorously, “and you get a little certificate that said you were dumb enough to do this.”
Cliff and Nancy’s middle child, Peter, is also a Class of 1984 Lawrence Academy graduate, and is now working on Hollywood movie and TV sets. “They were all different people at the same age … and it just seemed that Peter would benefit more, at the time and at his age,” Of their decision to send only one of their three children to LA, Cliff explains, “The others [oldest child Cliff III and youngest child Susan] were off on different tracks.”
Throughout the years, Cliff’s at-home woodworking shop has grown from a few tools in his basement to a dedicated (and above-ground) space. He doesn’t do it for the money, just when he’s inspired. “Unfortunately,” he says, “I don’t need any more furniture … so I have a little bit of a dilemma as to what I do with the stuff that I’ve made. But I'm still making it anyway.”
