Clarke would understand. He spent his life doing just that.
It all started 50 years ago, when the Long Island native moved to Vermont to open a small restaurant, motel and cabin court in Randolph. During the 1966 campaign season, he rented two rooms to a labor organizer — one for sleep, the other for planning and political meetings. Clarke sat in on some of those sessions and soon found himself in the crosshairs of a local newspaper.
“That week’s edition featured shots of cars in my parking lot with New York license plates, three flatlanders sitting at a table and an article about how out-of-staters were taking over Vermont politics,” he recalled in a 2012 essay for VTDigger. “It failed to mention that there were also five Vermonters sitting at that table who were conveniently cropped out of the photo.”
Clarke fired off a rebuttal letter to the editor to a competing paper. Soon after, he received a call from a staffer. He was a good writer, she said — would he be interested in moonlighting as a correspondent?
Four years later, Clarke was reporting for UPI, a wire service once rivaling The Associated Press with a staff in Montpelier. This was the time shortly after the fabled 1969 Woodstock music festival when supporters, legend has it, raised enough money panhandling and passing the hat to buy 592 acres — which they renamed Earth People’s Park — in the tiny Northeast Kingdom town of Norton.
The journalist, deciding to try some field reporting, camped out there one weekend.
“A spark was lit inside me,” he recalled in a 2005 Vermont Guardian essay.
Clarke went on to transport his wife and children north weekend after weekend to see the likes of Wavy Gravy, the Woodstock announcer later turned Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavor.
“The problem was, I forgot to come back to work on Monday,” he recalled. “UPI fired me.”
After a few years of living off the land without power, plumbing or phone, Clarke was rehired and, working full time as state news editor and bureau manager, wrote about how the federal government would seize the Norton property and turn it over to the state.
“I remember many times telling an intern, ‘This is how we do it,’ and they’d ask, ‘Why?’” he recalled in a 2012 VTDigger post. “Then I had to think about the ‘why’ because, since I’d never gone to college myself, most of what I knew and did was from instinct or experience.”
Clarke would accumulate plenty of it writing, editing, teaching journalism, consulting politicians, producing radio talk shows and TV documentaries, and founding the Freedom of the Road motorcycle group, which began what’s now the United Motorcyclists of Vermont annual Shriners Hospitals for Children Toy Run.
Ask Clarke’s peers for anecdotes about him, and they laughingly say the same thing: Ones that can be published on the record?
Retired Burlington Free Press journalist Candace Page remembers working with Clarke at UPI in the late 1970s.
“He was a natural reporter and storyteller who loved to do the human side of the news, and that is central to Rod’s character,” Page says. “When he was working, nobody was more straight up. He was fair, he was fast, he was smart and responsible. And then there was this outlaw side of him when he left the office.”
Vermont Life magazine editor emeritus Tom Slayton was reporting for the Rutland Herald and Barre-Montpelier Times Argus during Clarke’s tenure at UPI.
“I can’t quite remember how it came up, but we were talking about the need for social programs to help people who were less fortunate,” Slayton recalls, “and Rod said, ‘Tom, you’ve got to remember, you and I are sharks — we can feed ourselves. Not everyone can feed themselves.’ That was part of Rod’s ruling ethic. He always struck me as one of these characters that escaped from ‘Doonesbury’ — he was a funny guy in terms of having a sense of humor, but he really did have that gut feeling for the underdog and caring for others, which helps if you’re a journalist.”
Relocating to Florida in 1997 and returning to the Green Mountains last year, Clarke could boast of seven children, many grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and dozens of foster children. But in his last years, suffering what his family calls “a multitude of health issues,” he found himself writing more about loss: his parents, his best friend, a son and a son-in-law. His baby granddaughter. And his wife of 44 years.
“Tragic events can drive some people to the bottle, others to support groups, the pious to their churches,” he observed. “But I’m a writer, and my keyboard is my catharsis. It is here that I turn when I need release.”
That’s why Clarke, who most recently resided at the Berlin Health and Rehabilitation Center, wrote his own obituary.
“To say Rod lived a full life would be like saying Hemingway was a pretty fair writer,” he began, noting his time as a cowboy, bartender and bouncer, bulldozer operator, logger, owner of an asphalt paving business and marketing manager who helped Cabot Creamery cook up the Guinness World Records largest grilled cheese sandwich.
It’s also why Clarke sat down to type upon the death of a friend named Ron.
“And now I turn again to my keyboard,” Clarke concluded. “Ron’s legions of friends will quietly mourn his loss and raucously celebrate his life. Then we’ll go on with our own lives, ever knowing that we’ve lost something precious and important.”
Calling hours for Clarke are scheduled for Friday from 1 to 3 p.m. at Guare & Sons Funeral Home in Montpelier, with a celebration of life there at 3 p.m. and, after, a happy hour at the nearby Veterans of Foreign Wars post.
