Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 6, 1991 TAG: 9104060524
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Medium
For the first time, the 84-year-old Clark walks confidently into stores, able to decipher labels and prices on jars and cans.
A little learning has made him want more: Enough to read personal letters and the Bible stories he has heard all his life.
"I really don't want to stop," said Clark, the oldest student by decades in his class at the Adult Learning Center. "When I came here, I didn't know nothing. I was working with my fingers and just looking at the letters."
Clark drives his pickup truck to the school three days a week. He uses the truck to haul feed for neighbors' hogs in the rural southern section of the city, where he grows butter beans, peas and snap beans in his garden and sings tenor in his church choir.
He draws on his endurance to tackle tedious class work. He goes over and over simple sentences in a book that a teacher's aide put together about farming, gardening and other things he does.
Clark has been a farmer, longshoreman, construction worker and janitor. He retired years ago. He married twice but outlived both his wives. He reared three children and has 30 grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
He encourages them to go to school. An orphan, he was reared by a Weldon, N.C., farm family who wanted him to work. He went to school just one day.
"You ain't going to learn nothing," his foster mother told him as he struggled with his ABCs.
Over the years he learned a lot, but not to read and write.
He taught himself to drive and got his license, even though he couldn't read "Stop" on the red signs. It helped, he said, to know left from right.
In his 60s, Clark learned to write his name from a drugstore owner who had seen him make an "X" on checks.
He is not bitter about the years of illiteracy, he said.
"I'm glad the Lord has let me live long enough to let me go to school. I'm coming as long as I'm able."
by CNB