Celebrating UUCUC member Olive Clark’s 100th Birthday!

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Olive and her husband, Bob Clark, during a trip to Mexico in the mid-Nineties when they were active at UUCUC. Photo provided by Olive’s daughter, Susan Hopkins.

Olive Clark, long-time member of UUCUC will celebrate 100 years on July 27th. Even if you don’t remember her, we’re doing a card shower for her. If you do remember, mention a memory or two. Below is an “Olive Fact Sheet” provided by her daughter, Susan Hopkins. Olive’s address is: 101 W. Windsor Rd. #1213; Urbana, 61802.

  • Before she was born, her elder brother, a toddler, died in the third wave of the 1918 flu pandemic.
  • She was born July 27, 1920, the month before US women (effectively only white ones) got the constitutional right to vote nationally.
  • From the age of about three she hasn’t had depth perception and little vision in her left eye. An infection caused retinal scarring in both eyes, but was more serious in her left.
  • As a child, she loved soccer, roller skating, field hockey, and was fiercely competitive at marbles.
  • A child of the Great Depression, her family did more than okay, because her father was a machinist and superintendent in a huge handkerchief factory and people still needed handkerchiefs.
  • Berkley Secretarial School in NY city gave her typing and stenographic dictation skills that carried her through work in an amazing range of companies over the years, from the military, to stained glass, to law, to pharmaceuticals. Her work at Hoffman LaRoche offered free night college classes. Years later she finished with a BA from Cedar Crest.
  • During WW II she once woke up in a maternity ward in Greencastle, IN and she hadn’t been pregnant. She’d survived a car crash, only because she’d been lying down in the front seat of the car my father was driving. They were headed, from where he was stationed in Texas, back to New Jersey, in a snow storm. He ran under the back of a semitrailer truck.
  • She’s been married, and widowed, three times. She has two children, Susan in Urbana and Mark in Tucson, 3 grandkids, 4 great grandkids and 1 due July 24.
  • At the age of 67, she met her third husband, cross country skiing, when they were both on an Elderhostel trip in Taos, NM. Bob Clark, a UU, moved from Washington state to Urbana to marry Olive. They joined the Urbana UU church and became active volunteers, from Hospice to Urbana Sweet Corn Festival. Olive even typed up the minister’s sermons (the better to understand him).
  • For fourteen years, since the year after Bob died, Olive has enjoyed living in an independent apartment at Clark Lindsey Village. She will be moving to skilled care in one of the Greenhouse Homes at CLV.

UUCUC members and friends celebrate you Olive! Happy birthday!