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Please Note This oral history transcript has been divided into two parts. The first part documents the presidencies of John G. Kemeny and David T. McLaughlin. The second part documents the presidency of James O. Freedman and will be open to the public in June 2023, which marks twenty-five years following the end of his administration. This is part one. Cary Clark Interview Cary P. Clark ʻ62 College Counsel, Emeritus An interview conducted by Mary S. Donin December 3, 2008 Hanover, NH DOH-278 Rauner Special Collections Library Dartmouth College Hanover, NH 2 Cary Clark Interview INTERVIEWEE: Cary Clark INTERVIEWER: Mary Donin PLACE: Hanover, NH DATE: December 3, 2008 DONIN: Today is Wednesday, December 3, 2008. My name is Mary Donin, and Iʼm here at last, after six years, [Laughter] with Cary Clark, Dartmouth class of 1962, and former college counsel—first and former— college counsel starting in 19-- Well, you came in ʼ74, but you were made college counsel in ʼ77, right? CLARK: Yes. DONIN: Retiring in 2000. CLARK: Nineteen ninety-nine. DONIN: You retired in ʼ99? CLARK: I retired September 30, 1999. I started October 1, 1974, and ended September 30, 1999, 25 years to the day. DONIN: I donʼt know why I had you down for 2000. I guess because we came in 2000, I thought there was…. But there was no overlap. Okay. So I think the first thing weʼd like to start talking about is your…. How is it you came to Dartmouth? I know you were a legacy. Your dad went here, right? CLARK: Yes. DONIN: Was he the first member of your family to come to Dartmouth? CLARK: As far as I know, yes. 3 Cary Clark Interview DONIN: And was there ever any question in your childhood that you would go anywhere else? CLARK: Thatʼs interesting. Iʼve thought about that. I grew up in Lisbon, New Hampshire, which is a small mill town about 50 miles north of Hanover. My father was a member of the Dartmouth class of 1917. And his father before him grew up in that area, and Iʼve traced that sort of line of the family back, and it goes back into the Massachusetts Colony in the early 1600s. So Iʼve started genealogy. At least a good part of me on my fatherʼs side is Yankee stock. And my mother was from a very southern part of the West Virginia panhandle. They were introduced by a Dartmouth classmate of my fatherʼs in Boston, and married in the ʻ30s. My father was a member of the class of 1917, George E. Clark. There are a lot of George Clarks. He grew up in Lisbon as well and had a good time at Dartmouth. And then in ʼ17 signed up to save the world and went to Europe with General Pershing. Then did save the world and then returned and finished up at Tuck School. So he was a member of the Tuck class of 1920. I was born April 27, 1940, making my father, who was born in 1897…. He was 43. So thereʼs a long expanse of time. When I grew up, we came down to a lot of Dartmouth events: football games, basketball games, hockey games. So Dartmouth was sort of a part of my life. But I donʼt recall my father ever pushing it that I go to Dartmouth. But whether through his machinations or just through my simple view of the world, I only applied to Dartmouth. Then waiting for the results of my application in the winter of 1958, I finally asked my father a question that I shouldʼve asked a long time ago, which was, what if I donʼt get into Dartmouth? And he said without hesitation, “Well, then youʼll probably go to Phillips Exeter for a year and then apply again.” Fortunately that didnʼt happen; I did get in and came to Dartmouth in the fall of 1958. I was a real country boy. Going to Dartmouth for me was a big step. It was a worldly place. Fortunately, I didnʼt have a New England farmerʼs accent, largely because, I think, my father had lived away from the North Country for quite a while. And my mother was from the South. So at home I think we spoke non-Yankee English. But I 4 Cary Clark Interview was arriving here, living with people from big cities and prep schools, and felt very much out of water. I was very fortunate. I had a roommate; I was assigned a roommate in Room 209, South Massachusetts Hall, named Ted Mascott [ʻ62], George T. Mascott. And while his family was not financially well heeled because his father had sort of a lobbying job in Washington, he grew up in the highest of Washington Embassy Row society. I believe he went to Sidwell Friends, which is the school where the Obama children are going to go. He had all the social graces that I lacked and taught me everything from how to properly open an English muffin—not with a knife but pulling it apart—to how to dress properly. When I went to visit him once he took me to sort of a warehouse in Baltimore on the top floor, and there, there was a company that sold fine tweedy clothes, but with no labels. But he knew what to buy, and we got good stuff, very nice. And when we came back to our room, I noticed him sitting in a corner, and he had a little Sucrets metal box in front of him. And in it were Brooks Brothers labels that he had removed from clothes in the trash or from rummage sales, and he was carefully sewing the Brooks Brothers labels into his clothes. But it was wonderful. And we were different but we got along fine. So that helped me a lot. Later, I sort of understood having good people to live with and friends was important. We had…. Back then they did sort of have a preference for northern New England boys. Fortunately in admissions we werenʼt competing with most of the human race, no women. And we had, not my freshman year, I think my second year, a young man that moved into a room across the hall, with roommates that were not probably as charitable and accepting as mine was, and he was having trouble with the academics. We didnʼt follow very closely how other people were doing. And one day we went in there, and he was…. His roommate had come out and asked us to come in. We went in, and he said, “Look.” And we looked in, and he was sitting on the edge of his desk chair. And he was putting on his shoes. I looked at the other fellow, and I said, “So?” He said, “Keep watching.” And he began to take off his shoes. Then he put on his shoes, and then he took off his shoes. And what had clearly happened, he had psychologically hit a wall 5 Cary Clark Interview where he could not emotionally, mentally, physically move forward or go backwards. And then we realized he needed help. He got help, and left, and I donʼt think he ever came back to Dartmouth. And I always thought about that, because he was from the same sort of social background that I was. I was more fortunate in adapting a little bit. DONIN: Did you feel well prepared academically? CLARK: Better than I thought I was going to be. I was very fortunate. I had two or three really good teachers in my high school. My high school class had 23 in it, and very few ever went to college. I had some classmates who were achievers, and so we competed with each other. But I had good teachers. I was taking things like trigonometry in a little mill town high school so that I was prepared enough. My grades the first year and a half were just so-so; okay, but didnʼt knock anybodyʼs socks off. And as I went forward, I finally understood how it was done. And my average jumped from sort of B and B+ in my sophomore spring to almost straight As for the rest of the time. One of my great disappointments was that, because of the grades in my first and second year, I never made Phi Beta Kappa. But I did graduate cum laude. But it took a while to really sort of understand how the game was played. And interestingly, the high school kids that I knew got better and better and better and the private school kids went down. They really knew how to deal with the academics when they arrived, but they tended to get more drawn into the fraternity social life, to the exclusion of academics. So that you had this interesting crossing of lines, and I think it was typical that the high school kids [with] lesser means and maybe a little more drive, got better and better; and the preppies sort of went in the other direction. DONIN: Did you have any sort of mentor that… Obviously, your roommate helped you a lot with the social stuff. But someone who was an academic mentor here, a teacher or a dean? CLARK: Not really. I had a few teachers that I sort of liked. But there was nobody in particular. And my principal extracurricular activity was that, while I was not an athlete at all, Iʼd played a little basketball in 6 Cary Clark Interview high school, I liked athletics, and my father was a big fan of athletics.