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Admont Gulick Clark’s Lighthouses of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket — Their History and Lore, published in 1992, remains the best source of information for the beacons of that fascinating part of Massachusetts. With the publication of his latest book, Sea Stories of Cape Cod and the Islands, Admont Clark continues to be a leading chronicler of Cape Cod’s unique history and legends. The new volume contains 52 true stories and 146 illustrations, and covers subjects from shipwrecks and mutiny to women at sea.
His other books include They Built Clipper Ships in Their Back Yard, about the Shiverick shipyards of Cape Cod, and An Introduction to Poetry: The Real Imagination, published in 1972. Readers of Clark’s books might be interested to know that his own life is every bit as interesting as his writing.
Admont Clark’s father, Edward Leeds Clark, was the son of missionaries to Japan, and his mother, Eleanor Fowles Clark, was the daughter of missionaries to Turkey. Admont, born a year after the close of World War I, was named for an uncle who had been born at the foot of a Japanese volcano. “I have found only one other Admont anywhere,” he says. “A little Austrian village.” Edward Leeds Clark was an electrical engineer for General Electric. After spending time in Schenectady, New York, the family went overseas, living in Shanghai for two years, then two years in Manila. Clark remembers living in a house on stilts on Manila Bay, and swimming only in a wire enclosure because of the many poisonous jellyfish.
After the death of his father in 1926, Admont’s mother got a job at a hospital in New Hampshire. In 1929, they moved to Meriden, Connecticut, for another hospital job. Unable to provide a home for her three sons, Mrs. Clark sent the boys to a private school run by former missionaries. Three years later, the Clark boys were sent to the Walker Missionary Home in Auburndale, Massachusetts.
Clark eventually graduated from Newton High School in Massachusetts and then attended Amherst College for a time — he would later return to finish his degree, graduating cum laude. He ended up in New York City, working for Standard Oil and attending night classes at Columbia College, where he met Ruth Francis. Admont and Ruth were married in Provincetown on Cape Cod in 1941.
During World War II, Clark entered the Coast Guard Reserve as an officer candidate and soon was an Ensign on the Gresham, the oldest cutter in service at that time. The Gresham did convoy duty, escorting ships to Guantanamo Bay and Key West. Later, during the war, Clark became the commanding officer of the U.S. Army F-51, a small ship operated by the Army Transportation Corps but manned by the Coast Guard. After some months in the South Pacific, Clark returned to live on Cape Cod with Ruth. They lived in Yarmouthport and then Dennis, and had two children, Susan and David, and eventually three grandchildren.
“Cape Cod is a lovely place to live and a hard place to earn a living,” he says. After time working for the Truro Highway Department and the H. P. Hood dairy company, Clark was hired as an instructor at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. After retiring in 1960 on disability (having lost a kidney), he became one of the founding faculty of Barnstable’s Cape Cod Community College in 1961. “I was the English Department that first year,” he remembers. He also was the school’s public relations officer and ran the evening school.
At Cape Cod Community College, Clark founded the first community college newspaper in the state, The Beacon. Over the years, he taught English composition, American literature, Native American literature, and African-American literature. He retired from teaching in 1996.
At the community college he helped get started, praise for Clark is easy to find. Gary Getchell, a math instructor at Cape Cod Community College, has known Admont Clark for 30 years and calls him “a master story teller — both orally and via print media — as well as a tireless researcher, and a person who, while brought up at a time in our history where technology breakthroughs consisted of such things as AM/FM radio stations, has bridged the gap. He is truly a twenty-first century man who has lived most of his life in the twentieth and has written eloquently about the nineteenth.”
In a history she wrote of the college’s early days, Delores Bird quoted a student who called Clark a “real hot ticket, a nice guy.” Lore Loftfield De Bower, the current chairperson of the Department of Language and Literature, adds that Clark was “a pioneer, ahead of his time.” She says, “I don’t think there’s a colleague that doesn’t respect, admire and love him. He was totally dedicated to his students. He delighted in encouraging students to develop clear writing styles. He was an inspiration because of his dedication to higher education.” She adds, referring to Clark’s skills as a gardener, “He would bring in bags and bags of snowdrop bulbs. Because of Ad we all have snowdrops in our gardens.”
During his decades of teaching, Clark wrote articles for magazines like Yankee, The Rotarian, and Cosmopolitan. He calls his latest book, Sea Stories of Cape Cod and the Islands, “a collection of fifty-two true stories, with copious illustrations and lots of history, ranging from women at sea, cannibalism, to disasters, pirates, exploration and much more.” His favorite story in the book is “Two French Gentlemen.” He describes it as a “lovely little story about a young woman from Chatham headed for Boston to buy her wedding dress. On the way, her packet ship is overtaken by French privateers. Her sentimental story includes a shipwreck and rescue by her lovelorn fiancé.”
Besides his writing and teaching, Admont Clark played a large role, along with his wife, in the beginnings of the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History in 1954. He spent about 20 years as president and trustee and continues to volunteer at the museum. He also helped start the Dennis Public Library.
Asked what sparked his interest in lighthouses, Clark responds, “I spent 36 years in the Coast Guard Reserve, and in World War II I was most gratified to find a light where I thought it should be. I enjoy historical research and discovered that nobody had ever done a decent job of covering all the lights. So I did it, since it needed doing if a major part of the area’s history was to be saved.” When asked what lighthouse is his favorite, Mr. Clark says, “I guess it’s Highland Light, our first light. I know it well. In fact I have one lens piece from the last big lens.”
Regarding lighthouse preservation, he says, “Why keep them? True, they’re outdated today when almost every ketch or yawl has satellite navigation. But literally thousands of people across the country feel that they are part of our maritime heritage. After all, why is Mount Vernon preserved? And our Cape and islands lights are especially important, since our roots are so deeply in that maritime heritage. Captains’ houses are everywhere, often with their descendants living in them, revering their sea-going ancestors. This area lived off the sea.”
Last year Admont and Ruth Clark moved to Orleans, Massachusetts. “I’m beginning to feel my almost eighty years, but life is good,” says Mr. Clark. In October of this year, he and Ruth will celebrate 60 years of marriage, as well as decades of immeasurable contributions to the culture of Cape Cod.
This story appeared in the
November 2001 edition of Lighthouse Digest Magazine. The print edition contains more stories than our internet edition, and each story generally contains more photographs - often many more - in the print edition. For subscription information about the print edition, click here.
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