Coping with Grief
We would like to offer our sincere support to anyone coping with grief. Enter your email below for our complimentary daily grief messages. Messages run for up to one year and you can stop at any time. Your email will not be used for any other purpose.
Mark F. Clark " A pillar of the community, loved pie for breakfast" of Belmont, Massachusetts died Wednesday, August 11th at the age of 81 following a very brief hospitalization. The beloved husband of Susan, devoted father of Lisa and Kate, and delighted grandfather of Maya and Fiona. He is remembered for his unfailing integrity, intelligent curiosity, unwavering civic spirit, easy generosity, lifelong faith, gentle whimsey, and wide grin. Mark grew up in East Rochester, NY where his maternal grandparents were founding members of the community. Son of physicist Lawrence David Clark Sr. and homemaker Josephine F. Clark, Mark shared what he invariably recalled as an idyllic childhood with his sister Mary and brother L. David Jr. (now deceased); as well as his grandmother Furman; aunt and uncle Justine and Charles Harris and their daughter Stephanie. He enjoyed many happy summers with them all at family cottages on Lake Ontario, and guests recall the Clark household as a big extended unity, everyone coming in and out, inseparable from the neighborhood and community. Mark was active in Scouting and spent several of his teenage summers on staff at Camp Massawepie in the Adirondacks. Although he graduated in 1958 as the Valedictorian of his high school class, and never lived in his childhood home again in East Rochester, Western New York State, and his friends from early days continued to be a touchstone for Mark all through his life. Thanks to a National Honor Society Scholarship, Mark was able to attend Harvard College, where he graduated in 1962 with an A.B., magna cum laude. A Government concentrator and a resident of the then-new Quincy House, he was a mainstay among his friends, as he was also at the Loeb Drama Center where he volunteered as manager of lighting for theater productions. He fell in love with the Boston area and continued on at Harvard Law School, where he was an Editor and Treasurer of the Harvard Law Review. Colleagues there thought him perfect for corralling the ‘herd of cats’ mentality prevalent among the Review’s aspiring lawyers. Mark was joined for most of his years in Cambridge by his brother David, who followed Mark’s path through undergraduate and law degrees at Harvard. 1965 brought the end to his years at Harvard, with an LL. B., but it also brought the beginning of the rest of his life, he married Susan. Mark happily maintained connections with Harvard through the years, most
recently as an Associate Member of the Winthrop House Senior Common Room. Susan and he always attended and helped to plan reunions. Following Mark’s post-grad clerkship for the Chief Judge of the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, Harvard granted Mark a Knox Fellowship for study at the London School of Economics. During their time in London, Mark and Susan discovered what became a lifelong love of travel. Some of their happiest times were spent introducing Lisa and Kate to the delights of America and Europe. In later years, Mark and Susan enjoyed exploring historic B and B’s throughout New England and beyond. The law firm of Foley, Hoag and Eliot (now FoleyHoag) was Mark’s professional home for his entire three-decade career, where his fellow partners describe him as a “lawyer’s lawyer” who provided excellent legal and business advice to clients and to the many attorneys who turned to him to solve legal, business, and ethical problems. Because of this regard from his colleagues, Mark was elected as a member of the American Law Institute, which fed his continuing legal curiosity. At the firm, in addition to maintaining an active practice in insolvency, secured transactions and commercial law, Mark served for many years on the Executive Committee as well as co-managing partner for the eight years before he retired in 2000. A current managing partner observed that it would be difficult to overstate Mark’s impact on what FoleyHoag is today. In spite of Mark’s professional stature, while he was physically able, he invariably rode public transit to work always in his three-piece suit and bow tie, adding his trademark deerstalker hat in the winter.
Mark worked tirelessly for his firm, but for higher purposes too. He was an active and faithful member of Payson Park Church, enjoying study groups and serving on many committees, especially the Endowment Trustees. He was also a longtime director and then vice chairman of the American Congregational Association. Having a deep connection to and reverence for the Congregational Church didn’t mean that Mark was too serious, though. He loved sharing and hearing humorous stories and cartoons (especially from the New Yorker) and never met a pun he didn’t like. Mark also believed in the deeply New England tradition of effective, direct democracy, so in addition to his service as an attorney and church member, he was active in municipal government in the town of Belmont. His was a steady three-decade voice as an elected
Town Meeting Member (from 1979 to 2012), and because of what one current Member remembers as “his careful choice of words,” when Mark spoke, “people listened.” Trust in his judgement led him to be an appointed member of the Warrant Committee (1989-99), the Capital Budget Committee (1997-2011), and the Town Hall Complex Building Committee (2002-2004). Mark concluded his work for Belmont as a member of the Disability Access Commission (2018- 2021), thus turning the frustrations of a chronic disability into positive change. In 1997, a spontaneous brain stem bleed left a formerly spry and active Mark with double vision, sometimes slurred speech and uncertain balance. Although these devastating symptoms forced him to retire early (and to give up playing the piano, driving, and playing his beloved competitive croquet), he armed himself with his grandfather’s cane and remained determinedly active with Susan’s faithful help. This grit and independence continued even after a 2016 re-bleed left him able to get around only with a walker. Showing his usual ingenuity, he built his own unique wheelbarrow/walker combo so he could continue gardening. Such gardening, travel, friends, and home projects provided plenty of diversion, but the place that Mark was happiest was with extended family, sitting down to a holiday meal followed by a generous slice of homemade pie. He liked to paraphrase E.B. White’s quip, saying, “To foreigners, a Yankee is an American. To Americans, a Yankee is a New Englander. And to New Englanders, a Yankee is somebody who eats pie for breakfast.” Mark happily ate pie for breakfast. A Memorial Service will be held at Payson Park Church in Belmont, MA in the spring of 2022, when we hope the restrictions of COVID will be behind us. To honor Mark, donations may be made to Payson Park Church, 365 Belmont Street, Belmont, MA 02478 http:// www.paysonpark.org/, or to the neighborhood library near where Mark lived, Friends of the Everett C. Benton Library, P.O. Box 425, Belmont, MA 02478 https://ecbentonlibrary.org/
To send flowers to the family or plant a tree in memory of Mark Furman Clark, please visit our floral store.