Summary:
Clark attended the University of Chicago. She and her husband lived in Berkeley before moving to Lafayette in 1952. She was the founder of the Parent Participation Nursery School on 1st Street. She raised her family in Lafayette where she was active in many important causes, i.e. anti-smoking campaigns in schools, youth athletic activities, and the development of the Lafayette Crosses on her property in honor and appreciation of soldiers who died in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Her children were all successful in worthwhile endeavors. Louise was active in senior housing efforts and on the board of Chateau Lafayette and spearheaded efforts for Senior Housing for all. One of her recent interests was the Downtown Plan hoping to involve our creek setting. She was very creative and inspired to make every life better.
Oral History:
Good morning. It’s October 14th, 2010, and we’re here… Betsy Willcuts and me, Barbara Boyle, to interview Louise Clark, on her lifetime in Lafayette. Louise, let’s just begin.
Barbara Boyle: Give me your full name and any nicknames.
Louise Clark: I was born Louise Harvey and my family called me “Weezie”. I picked up the last name when I was at the University of Chicago, where I met the man who became my husband, Johnston Clark.
BB: Tell us a little bit about your childhood, where you grew up in Chicago.
LC: I grew up in Chicago. I was one of four girls of James B. Harvey and Carson Blake Harvey. We all did girlish things, even though my father really did want a son. He treated my oldest sister as a boy. He taught her to shoot and wrestle and box and all of those things that a father does with a son. She turned out to be a lovely girl, anyway, and the rest of us didn’t have to worry about those things, because that was all taken care of. So, we just did girly things like playing the piano and dancing and that was it. I went to a girls’ school, Faulkner School for Girls, until I went to the University of Chicago, and my parents were a little concerned that I might meet somebody that they might not approve of. They had heard rather frightening things about the University. They were afraid I might maybe meet a Democrat, which I happened to do, and I did happen to marry him. But they became reconciled to that, and for the last vote of my father’s life, when he was ninety-nine and a half years old, he did vote for the first Democrat in his life, and so of course he went to Heaven, at age ninety-nine and a half.
BB: How long have you lived in Lafayette and how did you happen to come here?
LC: My husband was in the Navy, stationed on Treasure Island. He loved California and when he was mustered out of the Navy he went back to Chicago, went back to his old job and decided, no, he wanted to live in California. So, we packed up our belongings and we moved to Berkeley. We bought the house that his sister had lived in when she was stationed in the WACs and her husband was in the Army, and they were mustered out of the service in Berkeley. So, we bought their house for $10,000, which was a very large sum of money. But we were just able to scrape together that money and bought the house.
BB: This was in what year?
LC: This was in 1948. We did love Berkeley, except for the fog. We lived there five very foggy years. We had four children while we lived in Berkeley. The children would nap between 1:00 and 3:00, the only time that the sun would come out in Berkeley. A friend dropped by and I was bemoaning to her the fact that there was no sunshine. And she said, “There is a place called Lafayette, and they call themselves ‘The Sunshine Valley’. I’m going to take you there.” So, she had me close my eyes, she drove me through the tunnel… she didn’t take me to Lafayette, she took me to the top of the hill overlooking St. Mary’s College, and then said, “Open your eyes.” I did open my eyes to beautiful sunshine (it was foggy in Berkeley) and said, “This is it.”
We didn’t move to St. Mary’s College, we moved to Lafayette, the Sunshine Valley. That was 1952.
BB: So, you had four children at that time?
LC: Yes, and we had two more in Lafayette. When I moved out to Lafayette, I thought Lafayette was the perfect place to live, except they didn’t have any parent-participation nursery schools, which we had in Berkeley. So I went to the school district and they said, “No, we don’t do that. If you want that, go back to Berkeley.” So, my husband and I realized how important it was, how much we had learned how to parent children when we went to the parent-participation nursery school in Berkeley, A Thousand Oaks. So, I put a notice in the paper that there was going to be a meeting of people interested in starting a nursery school and 16 people showed up. Two of them were attorneys and we incorporated and started having nursery school classes, first in our homes and then in… oh, we went to the Methodist Church, we leased some space there. We had some of our nursery school at the old Town Hall, and finally found a house on First Street, where we could move the children into our permanent home for the nursery school. We had a termite inspector check the house for termites. It had to be torn down. We had paid $10,000 for it but we decided we were paying $10,000 for the lot. It was a very handy spot in the middle of town and, we felt, just right for a nursery school. So, we tore that down and built the nursery school from the ground up. I deigned the building and John (he was the contractor) built it.
But everybody who was a nursery school parent participated in building the building, and some of them still talk about it today. One of them being Art DeGrassia, who was one of the principals of the garbage company. His children were in nursery school and he was one of the participating fathers, tearing down the old building and putting up the new building. I still see some of the early members, one of them was Amy Dewing. Amy and Bud had children there and they’re still dear friends.
BB: And after the nursery school, would you say that that was one of your reasons for being active in the affairs of Lafayette?
LC: Yes, there was a need for a nursery school. Nobody was doing it, so somebody had to. So, then the children went from nursery school first into Lafayette School. That was an elementary school near where we lived. Then we moved to the present location, where we have lived for 52 years, and we went to Vallecito School, which is no longer a public school, but at the time was a very wonderful public school for my children. While the children were there, I realized they were singing commercials not due to the school, but just when they were in the fourth or fifth grade, they were vocal and listening to television and radio they picked up all the commercials for cigarettes. And that really bothered me, because I knew that cigarettes could kill people. My husband and I had never been smokers, but his father was dying of emphysema and I had a younger sister that knew she was dying of lung cancer from smoking, and she did. I didn’t want my children to smoke.
There was a team of two men from the Seventh Day Adventist church who ere going around to schools with a smoking dummy, a mannequin of a 12-year-old girl they called “Smoking Sue.” I decided I wanted to take that dummy around to the PTA schools of Contra Costa County and show the children why they should not smoke. I got some dried lung specimens from the Cancer Society. One dried lung specimen was a normal lung, and it was pinkish gray. It looked like a pinkish gray sponge. The two other lungs were from smokers. One of them was black, with cancer in it, and looked pretty awful. The other looked even worse, and it was a lung filled with emphysema. It looked like a sponge that had been really destroyed. And Smoking Sue had her mouth drilled to smoke a cigarette and tubing going into two mason jars in her back that was cut out so children could see the smoke going from the cigarette in her lips into the lungs, which were mason jars with white angel hair in the jars. After Sue smoked several cigarettes, the angel hair was no longer white and eventually there was tar on the bottom of the jars. It was the same kind of tar that you could see on the streets, and that was really impressive to the children. They didn’t want tar in their lungs. Years later, some adults would see me on the street and tell me they had seen the Smoking Sue and it had convinced them not to start smoking. One of the teachers also told me—I had gone to one school and I went back a year later—and the teacher told me she had watched the demonstration and she hadn’t had a cigarette for the whole year. So, I was very pleased with that, and my children never did smoke.
BB: How did the crosses of Lafayette get started?
LC: My husband and I were on a cruise with Bob and Hilma Heaton. They live on Springhill Road and they’ve lived here as long as I’ve lived here, or longer. We were cruising down the coast of the eastern United States on March 19, 2003. That night the captain called us all into the lounge and said our president was going to have an address to the country and he wanted us all to hear that. And that was the announcement that President Bush made that our planes were bombing Iraq. Shock and awe! It was horrifying to me to listen to that, and after the president had spoken there was no sound from the 100 passengers assembled in the lounge. And I stood up and said, “But nobody in those planes that bombed the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, nobody came from Iraq. We’re bombing the wrong country!” And I sat down. And nobody talked about it for the rest of the trip, except the Heatons and the Clarks.
When I got home, the Heatons’ son Jeff came over to my house and sat right here with me and John and said he was just as concerned as his parents about what was happening, and our soldiers were being killed and nobody was really being concerned about it. It was just not something that was getting the attention it should get. So, he asked if he could put some crosses on my hill, John’s and my hillside, for each one of the soldiers that had been killed. This was right afterwards, and by that time there were a number in those first two days… maybe about 19, I think. So, he began putting up crosses. He put up two crosses and the next morning they were gone. So, he came back, and he said, “Well, I guess I can’t do it. People are not accepting it.” So, he didn’t do anything until November 11th, Armistice Day, 2006. So, this was three years later. And by this time, 3,000 of our troops—Navy, airmen, and women over there—had been killed. And he said, “I can’t stand it. I have to do something.” I suggested he call in helpers.
He couldn’t do 3,000 crosses. So, I suggested he call the Mount Diablo Peace and Justice Center and Grandparents for Peace in Rossmoor and there’s an organization pretty much in Orinda, but also, Lafayette, another peace and justice organization, so he called them, and the word got around. And over a hundred people put in the time sawing up the crosses, nailing them together, painting them, digging holes, planting them. Over a hundred people have worked on the crosses that you see today. And they continue working on them. The hardest job now is keeping the weeds down. It’s hard to do because you can’t use the Weed Eater that most weed eradicating companies use. You have to cut by hand between each one of those crosses. It’s a very hard thing. And Jeff and his fellow volunteers are still doing it. I know a friend asked me how I felt when I drove there, and I saw that, and I said it’s almost like a church experience. Yes, it’s almost like that. People that see it, people that work on it all have different visions for doing it. I was there one time. Nobody else was there and a woman drove up and stopped. There’s a red curb and you can’t really park there. But she got out and went to a cross with no name on it… some of the crosses have names on them… she went over to a cross with no name and just stood there with her head bowed, for a few minutes, and then she went back to her car and drove away. It’s just a very powerful experience for people, not just people seeing it for the first time, but people even working there.
BB: What was the opposition to it?
LC: They feel that it’s anti-troops. But in a way it’s because we have concern that all these people died thinking that they were saving us from terrorism and they don’t get much recognition for what they did, for giving their lives. And we hope that this would be a little bit of recognition for them.
BB: Do you miss anything about the way Lafayette used to be?
LC: Lafayette used to be the way I interacted to Lafayette with my children. My children were very active in swimming, they loved LYA, it became LMYA (with Moraga) later. It was probably the most important part of their lives for five years or so, while they were active in the swim team. One daughter, Candy, was very quick. She was like a wind-up toy. You’d put her in the pool, and she would start kicking before she hit the water. She got a state recognition for the fastest time for six-year-olds and under for 25 yards. She did that in .17 flat, and the record held for 12 years. When she was eight, she decided she wanted to go to the Olympics in swimming. Then she had a year being serious about swimming where you have to swim all year outdoors, and she realized no, she got too cold. She would not go to the Olympics in swimming. But she convinced herself that she was going to go to the Olympics. So, when she was 15, she changed and decided she was going in for kayak, and she did. She was in the Montreal Olympics in 1976 in her kayak.
BB: So, she keeps up with kayaking? Even though she has three children now?
LC: She has three grown children. One of them is just leaving NASA. He was in Mountain View. He had been assigned to the Mars landing, and he was very disappointed when government funding was cut off for the Mars landing, so now he is looking for a job in the public sector, but it won’t be as exciting—nothing will be as exciting to him as the Mars landing. Candy’s second child is just starting law school in Boulder, CO. I was a little bit disappointed that she was going to law school, but she said she’s going into environmental law and she wants to save the world through environmental law. A little before this, she was concerned about lymphoma. I have lymphoma and I am under treatment for it and I will be in remission at the end of the treatment in December. She felt that she could help my lymphoma by doing Tenn-in-Training Iron Man. In the summer there was an Iron man event for which she had to raise money. And she did, in order to be involved. The Iron Man involved swimming 2.4 miles, then riding a bicycle for 12.4 miles, and then running a full marathon, 26-point-some miles in one day. She did it in 14 hours. She survived. Seven hundred people did this. They didn’t all make it. Five hundred made it and Sarah was one of those. She was not the winner but, as they said, everyone’s a winner because the funds go to the Lymphoma/Leukemia Society. She’s hoping that there will eventually be something to prevent these diseases and, if not, will cure them. Right now, it just puts them in remission. At my age, that’s not too bad.
BB: Louise, tell us about the beautiful home and spot—did you build the house? Was there anything here before? And a little bit about your neighborhood.
LC: The neighbor’s house, just above mine is where Jennifer Russel grew up… Jennifer is our Recreation Director for the City of Lafayette. She had been the Recreation Director for 31 or 32 years. Last year the city had a recognition of her 30 years of service and gave her a big party. Jennifer Russel grew up next door in the main, big house that was here in the E. K. Wood estate. It was 16 acres, a great big swimming pool and tennis court and when John bought it from Harvey Lyons, who bought it from E. K. Wood, he decided that the pool and tennis court were really so wonderful that they should be shared by the neighborhood, so he set it up that the 34 families that are built around on the 16 acres would all be owners and participants in the use of the pool and tennis court. It’s been a wonderful place for the children to grow up. There are no fences (except around the pool and tennis court… the fence isn’t quite high enough because occasionally a ball does go over the fence and into the pool, but not very often). The children grew up with all the neighborhood children and the mothers taking turns watching them at the pool. So, it’s a very wonderful place for children to grow up.
BB: In other words, John bought 16 acres including that house.
LC: Including the house, yes. And so, we built this house. I designed it and John built it.
BB: Do you know anything about Mr. Wood?
LC: Yes. He was a lumber man, and his wife was killed driving down the driveway of the home, which is now Juniper Drive. He came up Blackthorn, Blackthorn goes into Juniper, and Juniper went into Mt. Diablo Blvd. before there was any freeway. So that was the main road going into Lafayette. It wasn’t very busy when she was killed, but cars came along fast in those days. That made this not a very happy place for him, so he sold to Harvey Lyons, and Harvey and Eleanor lived here for a while, and then they moved to Piedmont gardens, because Lafayette does not have a senior residence that is designed for people who don’t need government-supported housing. Lafayette has a very fine Chateau. It’s 65 units for senior housing for seniors who don’t have enough money to live in a… it’s subsidized housing. I’m on the board and I enjoy going to the meetings and several of the residents are good friends. It’s something that Lafayette needs for seniors that don’t have the money to pay market rate, but Lafayette needs a market-rate place like Piedmont Gardens. And our mayor, Barbara Langley, was not able to find a place to live in Lafayette, so she and her husband moved to Piedmont Gardens. We need something like that in Lafayette.
BB: I didn’t realize that’s how you came to be interested in that.
LC: We had hoped to build that.
BB: Where the crosses are now, was originally going to be senior housing?
LC: Yes, we had thought that it would be ideal for us, when we couldn’t drive anymore, we could get on BART, and it really would have been. But the impetus for that is no longer here, because John is no longer here, but when I look at the crosses, I think of him and I think that that would be a good place for market-rate senior housing.
BB: How did John get interested in contracting? Had he had that in mind all the way along when he came from Chicago?
LC: When he married in Chicago, he was working for S and P Electric Co., and he felt that maybe that was not his future career, and so he talked to my father about a career for him. My father had always wanted to be a builder. He was a real estate man in Chicago, and so he suggested that California was booming, and John really would be happy being part of that boom in construction. He was very happy in the boom of construction and it was just right for him. He would start with a piece of land and he would find an architect and they would go over the plans and eventually end up with something somebody would move into and he made a lot of friends that way. A lot of our friends became our friends when John built houses for them.
BB: Was this in this area or…?
LC: Lafayette, Orinda, Moraga, and one in Pleasant Hill.
BB: Did he ever build any homes for your children?
LC: No. Well, yes. He tried to build one for our daughters, but it didn’t work out.
BB: Where do you see Lafayette going in the future, since you’ve been such an integral part of where it is today?
LC: I think the people who live in Lafayette really want it to stay pretty much the same way it is. I would like to see a little more opening up of the creeks. I have been to San Luis Obispo and I just love their downtown. They have a creek in the middle of downtown They’ve cleared away the shrubbery and people, can go down there and they can walk along, there’s a little restaurant down there. Lafayette has a creek in downtown. I would love to see our town utilize that creek. Didn’t the General Plan do that, or not? They were talking about it with the Downtown Plan, but nobody seems to be as interested in that as I am. I wish everybody would go look at San Luis Obispo.
BB: Betsy, do you have any more questions that you’d like to ask?
Betsy Willcuts: I’d like to ask Louise if she has any stories that she’d like to share with us that we haven’t touched on at this point.
LC: Well, I have one that’s not [about] Lafayette. It was: I was a board member of the Mental Health Association and a head nurse for the county hospital came to our board meeting and said, “There’s something very bad in the county jail.” She said her nephew had a fixit ticket that he had not taken care of—he was this 18-year-old kid—and boys can ignore things like that, and he did. He was picked up on a Friday night and put in the old jail (this was 35-40 years ago). You can see its little dungeon across from the county building where the supervisors meet. And he was not released until Monday, when he could be arraigned, pay a fine for whatever the infraction was for which he was incarcerated. He had been raped in his cell. The cells were monkey cages, eight men to a cell, so they took turns raping the kid. He was so traumatized when he got out that he hung himself.
It was a terrible blow to the family and the head nurse wanted the Mental Health Association to see what they could do about the plans for the new jail, which had the same situation: monkey cages with eight men to a cell. So, John and I went to the architect, Conker(?), the big architect who was doing the plans for the new jail. We told him that we were concerned about the eight men to a cell, and Mr. Conker said, “Okay”. So, he crossed out the eight and made it six! Then we realized that there’s something wrong with that architect, who was designing something that would be so disastrous to the people who would be locked up.
I convinced the sheriff to give me a list of who was in the jail—not the names, I just wanted to know why they were in there—and 55% of them were in there for violations of the vehicle code. Now it could be a faulty windshield wiper, a bald tire, and, of course, you don’t want a faulty car on the road, so impound the car. Don’t lock the kid up in a situation where he’s going to be so maligned and so destroyed. The sheriff agreed that they were mostly 18-year-old kids, and the jail was full of 18-year-old kids. And so, the sheriff said everybody agrees we have to have a new jail and that’s what the architect is working on right now.
Of course, the architect was working on the wrong kind of jail and, at that time, there were national guidelines saying, “One person per cell and every cell has to have an outside window,” and the one that the architect was designing was a Bastille, 100 feet tall, solid concrete, walls three feet thick, no windows. It was so incredible! And when I asked the architect about why it should be such a secure building, for people who were in there for violations of the vehicle code, he said, “We’re protecting them from the outside. There could be a lynch mob on the outside that wants to get these people on the inside.” For bald tires?! Yeah, the whole thing was just ridiculous overkill, and the national guidelines said every cell had to have an outside window and the cells could not look like monkey cages. They had to have privacy, the window where the guards could look in, but not the total exposure of the full-bar door. So, the supervisor said, “Nope. We can’t do that. We’re too far along and, Mrs. Clark, you’re costing us $3,000 a day by holding up this jail.” And I said, “But you can’t build this jail because it’s unconstitutional to do this to people.” But the supervisors were not convinced.
By this time, through some letters to the editor, there were people that were concerned. I went around to every church and told them what was happening, and said, “This is not what we want happening to our young people.” And so, we got a petition and we got it into the ballot, and we won. The county could not build a jail which did not confirm to national guidelines, which said every cell had to have an outside window, one person per cell, etc., etc. So, we got it. And when was that completed? About 35 years ago. It was a great celebration, and the supervisors all took credit for this wonderful jail they had built, and the sheriff was so proud of his new jail and they had a grand opening and they invited all of the people who had worked on the jail and the supervisors invited me to come spend the first night in the jail, which I did! If you don’t take care of your fixit ticket, it’s not too bad. But it’s really better to take care of your fixit ticket!
BB: We’ve seen a life that was filled with purpose and helping other people, with Louise. Thank you so much.
Additional information on positions in organizations that Louise Clark held, which were not included on the tape. They are as follows, in her own words: Girl Scout leader for both my girls; Den mother for 16 cubs, including my youngest son; Board member of Lafayette Nursery School; League of Women Voters in Diablo Valley; Mental Health Association; ACLU; Woodland Hill Association; Lafayette Senior Recreation Center (now and two years as president) and now Chateau (65-unit residence for low income seniors in Lafayette); C0-organizer (with Johnson Clark and Bob Heaton) of Lafayette’s first Peace Parade (during the Vietnam War); Co-organizer (with Johnson and Candy Clark) of Lafayette’s first Triathlon.
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