July 19, 1913 – April 3, 1991. “Grampa Jim” — Elise's father, Fred's maternal grandfather.
He was born in Washington, D.C., into an old capital family — the Clarks and the Heiskells, whose middle names (Gouverneur, Kortright) reached back toward the early Republic. He went to Sidwell Friends, crossed from Southampton to New York at fifteen in 1928, and read his way through Lehigh in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. By the late 1930s the family had moved to California, and he spent the rest of his life on the Monterey Peninsula, at Pebble Beach.
In 1941 his daughter Elise was born; a son, Harry, followed in 1948. He and his wife, Sarah Louise Williams, divorced in 1969. Fred remembers him as distant and dark — a man who made more than one attempt on his own life, and also a raconteur who threw at least one spectacular wedding late in life, along the Seventeen Mile Drive in Carmel, with a guest list that ran to a man who sold “Christian Adult Rubber Novelties.”
He contracted HIV from a tainted blood transfusion, early in the epidemic and before the blood supply was reliably screened, and died of it in Monterey in 1991, at seventy-eight. He is buried at Pacific Grove. After his death Fred and Elise drove up together to clear out the Pebble Beach house; on that trip a jack sank into the mud during a tire change and the car came off it while Fred stood in the fall zone — the Clark house nearly took one more.