Mickey Clark has left his stamp on local lore

Originally published Saturday, October 25, 1997

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

Some old-timers get a bang telling about the good ol' days when fireworks were legal and they lit 2-inchers under the neighbor's front porch.

But Mike "Mickey" Clark, a tad under 90 and still an imposing 6-foot-2-1/2, remembers the whole center of Whidbey Island shaking when he sneaked through the bushes to watch the 12-inch mortar batteries at Fort Casey test firing over Admiralty Inlet. He has an old snapshot of a test firing, in which the camera caught the huge shell soaring through a muzzle blast.

"Dad was a young civilian engineer attached to Fort Casey -- he helped build it -- and I was born in the old base hospital in 1910. My grandfather was an ordnance sergeant who retired from the service there," Mickey recalled.

Mickey Clark is a walking Whidbey history book, 87 years of grass-roots recollections that were transplanted not far from the old fort when his father retired. "Dad became a chicken-and-egg rancher, and the base supply buckboard pulled by a team of mules would come by for eggs on their way to the store at Prairie Center," Mickey said.

"They also carried fort kids to school near Prairie Center. It had, as I recall, at least two rooms, and the high school was upstairs. Civilian kids weren't supposed to ride the buckboard, but we'd run along behind and someone would grab us by the seat of our pants and haul us aboard."

Island kids in the early part of this almost-done century didn't waste a whole lot of time in school, because there always was work to do at home. "Of course, we hunted pheasant a lot with our two cocker spaniels," Mickey said. "And we did a lot of swimming . . . actually, skinny-dipping with the local Indian kids. Never gave it a second thought; no one bothered with swimming suits for kids back then."

And he never lived much farther away as his dad shifted careers to shopkeeper and then county engineer. The men in the Clark family had a passion for playing baseball, and Mickey played on school teams and Fort Casey teams with his father and uncle. "They didn't have radar to clock pitches then, but I threw a real bullet of a fastball," he said.

The Clark family connection with baseball is part of central Whidbey lore. Both Mickey and his late wife, Margaret, coached youth teams for years. Mickey can recall many of his former players' names, positions and even some of their playing talents. And those former players still remember Mickey as a coach and man dedicated to his young players' welfare.

Like most native sons, Mickey Clark never thought much about living or working anywhere on the mainland. After a couple of tries at both Western Washington College (at Bellingham, where his high school sweetheart, Margaret, earned her degree before a 35-year teaching career in Coupeville) and St. Martin's College (Olympia), where he played baseball, he came home to the island to become an assistant postmaster at Coupeville.

He also was following Margaret, whom he married. They raised a family over the next half-century. Their daughter, Patricia, is a schoolteacher and their son, Dennis, is a school principal. And there are grandchildren's photos across the wide fireplace mantelpiece in the family home on Northeast Third.

Mickey has pretty well recovered from a stroke earlier this year, and there's no shortage of close friends and relatives checking in with him daily. But his Margaret died 11 years ago, he says with a softened voice, ". . . and God, do I miss her!"

It was the responsibility of being a husband and father that made him leave the assistant postmaster job at Coupeville. "I found I could make more money as a rural-route carrier, so I switched to that. Did it for 35 years . . . 87 miles a day, six days a week. I think we got about 3 cents a mile, maybe 5 cents, for using our personal car, and we always had to have it well-maintained and ready to go."

That's almost a million miles of Whidbey Island back roads, sunup to dark and darker, rain, getting stuck in the snow or sand, and all that other stuff about appointed rounds, from Oak Harbor 12 miles to the north all the way down to Freeland.

"All of that time in Chevies," Mickey bragged. "I never had much car trouble, except for a Ford that a friend of mine told me I needed. I had a Chevy, and he talked me into that Ford and it was nothing but trouble. So I went back to Chevies, and I still drive one."

Between hauling Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward and J.C. Penney catalogs -- "they came in by the truckload, almost 1,000 at a crack" -- Mickey also had to cram his Chevy with baby chicks ("Sometimes half of them arrived here dead, and we'd have to fill out forms and send back to St. Louis for replacements.") and even honeybees ("I always said if they ever got out of their box, they could have the Chevy!").

The downside of delivery was finding an old friend's letter addressed to Mickey himself, waiting in the flag-up delivery box one day. "He was a nice ol' guy," Mickey recalled. "We'd always go to his place for milk whenever our cow was dry.

"But he learned he had cancer. He told me one day while he was sitting outside and the tree was all white with cherry blossoms. Well, his flag was up one day and there was a note for me. I can remember what he'd written:

"'Dear Friend Mickey. When you find this, I will be no more. I'll be in the kitchen. Please notify the authorities. Your friend, Louis.' Well, I wasn't supposed to leave the car, but I locked it and went up to the house and peeked in the kitchen window and saw him lying there in a puddle of blood. I went to the closest phone and called the sheriff."

Jon Hahn is a staff columnist who writes three times a week in the P-I.