It was the fall of 1972 and Tim Clark remembers the moment vividly.
The southern portion of Vermont had just been clobbered with a rare Halloween snowstorm, knocking out “every cable in Bellows Falls,” and Clark, a lineman for Claremont Cable, was working to restore service. He got to talking with a homeowner and somehow it came up that he was just four months removed from his Harvard graduation.
“He said ‘What are you doing on my roof?’” Clark remembers. “I quit the next day.”
Their intention, when Clark and his wife May moved to New Hampshire, was to eventually land in Vermont and live off the land. But that idea never came to pass, and without a real path to follow, Clark sent a demo tape to WKNE in Keene.
There were no openings at the station, but he was offered an early morning gig in Concord. It was the beginning of what has been a lengthy journalism career that continues to this day, albeit on a much smaller scale. Clark spent a couple years working the 5 a.m. shift at WKXL in Concord, and then landed at WENH, Channel 11 in Durham, where he would work his way up to anchor.
But it was a profile he wrote while working for the New Hampshire Times that put him on the career path he so desperately wanted. He spent six months putting together a piece about Rob Trowbridge, who was then publisher of Yankee Magazine, with hopes that one day it would provide a foot in the door.
“I said this is a long-term project for my future,” Clark said. “It was one of those space shots, Hail Marys you put out there and hope for the best.”
It was Clark’s dream to work at Yankee, and about six months after the story went to print, he got a job offer. From 1976 to 1999, Clark remained at Yankee. He worked as a staff writer, editor of a spin-off magazine called the New Englander, book reviewer and eventually managing editor.
Clark couldn’t have crafted his story any better, but he always thought that one day he’d like to teach. He had never taken a single course on education, but that wasn’t about to hold him back. Clark says he saw his career with the written word as an asset and one that he could share with the young minds of the Monadnock Region.
And in the fall of 1999, Clark was hired as the newest English teacher at ConVal High School.
Looking back, Clark says he knows why things were tough in the beginning: he thought he knew what he was doing.
But in fact he didn’t, and now realizes that nothing was going to help him except time in the classroom.
Clark will admit he was second-guessing his new career choice, wondering why he ever left Yankee.
“I took a 50 percent pay cut to do a job I was failing at, and I was miserable,” he said.
There was even a pool among the teachers on how long he’d last.
“I had a terrible first couple years,” Clark said.
Something told him to stick with it, though, so he did. And Clark saw many young students realize their potential and he helped drag it out of many others.
“You can’t just show up. It’s not fair to them, it’s not fair to yourself,” Clark said. “Because it’s the only place on Earth where we choose to believe every kid can be successful.”
He was tough, but fair, asking his students to challenge themselves when it came to classic literature, thus sharing in Clark’s number one passion.
As much as he loves to write, nothing in his life brings a greater joy than reading. In fact, Clark admits it’s all he really does these days – outside of his limited part-time hours at Yankee as a fact checker – after retiring in 2012 after 13 years years at ConVal.
“I’m not good with time on my hands,” he said.
He’s part of a book club that meets on Tuesdays, but says that doesn’t come anywhere close to satisfying his love of reading.
Currently, Clark is reading five books, including “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy, which he and May read aloud to each other in the evenings.
Clark remembers when his love of reading all began. It was his 10th birthday and he got Bomba the Jungle Boy and Tom Swift Jr. books. Clark jokes that reading is the only thing his father saw him do.
“But I never saw my father reading,” he said.
Despite his love for the written word, Clark originally wanted to be an actor. He was prepared to go to Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, but at the urging of his high school guidance counselor, he also applied to Harvard. In a span of three days he was accepted to both, and when you get accepted to Harvard, he says, you go.
“I’m still not entirely sure it was ideal though,” Clark said.
When he arrived on campus, Clark realized that the Ivy League school didn’t have a theater major.
“You’d think I would have noticed that,” Clark said.
So he settled on a degree in general studies with a concentration in government, mostly because he didn’t have to write a thesis.
He still pursued acting. However, when he asked his theater professor if he thought Clark could be a professional actor and got a quick no, Clark was left wondering what to do next. What he did know – or at least he learned over the years – is that he should have majored in English. He jokes he really majored in May, his wife.
Clark said it was a weird time to go to college in the height of the Vietnam War, with ongoing protests and unrest seemingly everywhere. It was his clue to move away from Boston, which is what brought him to New Hampshire.
“We wanted to get out of the city before the street fights started because we thought the revolution was coming,” Clark said.
And it was that simple decision to submit a demo tape to the little radio station in Keene that finally gave Clark a path to follow.
Working in both radio and television, Clark got to interview the likes of Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy, the bonus of being a journalist in the ‘First in the Nation’ primary state.
At Yankee, he was afforded the opportunity to pitch some pretty interesting pieces. In 1984, when the Space Shuttle Discovery was making its maiden voyage into space, Clark wrote about a 96-year-old by the name of Percy Roope, who had witnessed the launch of the first liquid-propellant rocket in 1924.
He interviewed the likes of Dr. Benjamin Spock and two-time Pulitzer Prize winning historian Barbara Tuchman.
And he even got to play a society gent in a production of “The Time of Your Life” for the Peterborough Players 50th anniversary season. It was a small part, in which he ordered a drink and smoked a cigar.
He’s not the only educator who lives in his Dublin home, as May spent 10 years as the principal of Dublin Consolidated School and another decade on the ConVal School Board. Together they have three adult children and five grandchildren.
While in his retirement, Clark has tossed around the idea of writing a book, even tried at one point. But it hasn’t gotten very far.
“I’m a sprinter, not a long-distance man,” Clark said of his writing.
He’d love to put together a collection of his education columns that appeared in this very paper.
These days, outside of reading and making sure everything that goes in the Old Farmer’s Almanac is factually correct, Clark also serves as the Dublin Town Moderator. He is in his eighth term and has never been opposed.
“Who would want my job?” Clark said.
It was billed as a one-day-a-year job, yet he says that’s far from the case. But he enjoys the work and sees the importance of the position – which is why he still does it.
If you’ve ever heard Clark speak, you can see why he was able to land a radio job and why he gets royalty checks a few times a year from his voice-over work, mostly for Ken Burns films, another person he profiled while at Yankee.
For someone who wasn’t quite sure what he wanted to do with his life, Clark sure found a path that worked out for him.