Published: March 17, 2009 07:24 am      

Catlettsburg recalls favorite son

Billy C. Clark dies at Virginia home

CATLETTSBURG — It was a long row to hoe, but Billy C. Clark came to the end of the furrow Sunday.

The Gate City’s favorite son and literary lion died Sunday at his home in Farmville, Va. Word of his passing flashed almost instantly through the network of old friends in Catlettsburg, where Clark grew up poor and then left to write about Kentucky river folk.

Clark was 80.

“He was an American original. Such a character and a great storyteller,” said James M. Gifford, CEO and senior editor of the Jesse Stuart Foundation.

Clark’s intimate knowledge of the river and its inhabitants — both human and animal — together with his keen literary eye and ear, bound him forever with his town on the banks of the Ohio, in the same way Mark Twain was tied to the Mississippi River.

In fact, Gifford said, reviewers often made the comparison.

Clark published his first short stories as a student at the University of Kentucky in the 1950s. He burst onto the literary scene in 1960 with “A Long Row to Hoe,” his memoir of growing up dirt-poor in Catlettsburg.

His memories were true to life, said Marvin “Coach” Meredith, one of Clark’s boyhood friends. Clark would work whatever odd jobs he could get, trap muskrats and catch fish to make a few dollars. Clark knew he was poor but he didn’t let that stop him. “He was a go-getter,” Meredith said.

The first in his family to graduate from high school, Clark served in the Army during the Korean conflict and then went to UK on the GI Bill. It was then that he started writing and selling short stories.

After college, he returned to Catlettsburg and lived for about a year with Meredith and his wife, Lenora. The Merediths worked all day so Clark had plenty of time to write.

He had a way of collecting snippets of a story on a notepad he carried everywhere, Meredith remembers. They might be hard at work splitting a log, or out in the woods hunting on a Saturday. “All of a sudden he’d stop and put down something.”

There was a drawer in Clark’s desk stuffed with such notes, which he eventually would dig out and make into a story.

In high school, Clark was known as an athlete and everyone knew he wrote poetry, but there was little sign that he’d go on to prominence, said Caroline Wilson, who was two years behind him in school. When “A Long Row to Hoe” was published, Wilson was living in Washington, D.C. “I ran right out and got a copy,” she said. “Everything he writes is so true and his poetry is beautiful.”

Eleanor Kersey was three years behind Clark in school. She recalls he worked on the school paper but it wasn’t until she was out of school and saw his published books that she knew he was a real author. “He was just an old friend and we appreciated that he’s done well.”

Clark taught at UK as writer in residence for 18 years and rose to the rank of full professor. He relocated to Virginia, where he was writer in residence at Longwood University in Farmville. He was founder and editor of “Virginia Writing.”

His stories were widely anthologized and he sold film rights to the novel “Goodbye Kate” to Walt Disney studios.

In recent years, Clark’s old friends have appreciated the writer’s loyalty to his hometown. Clark never forgot his roots, returning to Catlettsburg almost every Labor Day and at other times of the year. “We tend to be that way in Catlettsburg. We have our loyalty to our place,” Kersey said.

“It’s home. He always felt that this was his home, no matter how far afield he went,” Wilson said.

Maybe his devotion to home was a gift from his mother. The story goes that Bertha Clark was on a streetcar homebound from Huntington when she went into labor. The driver raced to get the car across the river so that Billy C. Clark would be born on Kentucky soil.

Fittingly, the bridge across the Big Sandy River from Kenova to Catlettsburg was named for him in 1992.

His portrait was reproduced as a mural on the floodwall in the Gate City and in 1999, the Kentucky Folk Art Center at Morehead State University named him an Appalachian Treasure.

Clark could have been forgotten as an author but for his association with the Jesse Stuart Foundation. By the late 1980s, most of his books were out of print.

In 1991 he contracted with the foundation to reprint his works and halted the slide into obscurity. “Billy’s star rose again,” Gifford said.

The foundation keeps all of his books in print.

Clark’s funeral will be at 11 a.m. Thursday at the Oakland Avenue Baptist Church in Catlettsburg.