Elizabeth "Betsy" Comer Clark

Elizabeth “Betsy” Comer Clark died on Monday, February 22, at the age of 85, after several years with dementia. She had been a bright, spirited, unconventional woman with a lifelong love of literature, classical music, opera, dogs, and tennis. Her decline began about four years ago and was severe. Dementia is a cruel disease to those who suffer it and to those who love them.

Betsy was born in Macon, Georgia, on August 6, 1935, the daughter of Chester Johnson Comer, a career U.S. Army officer who served in China during World War II and retired as a colonel, and Elizabeth “Bep” Peavey Comer, who came from a peach-growing family. She had one brother, Johnny.

In 1956, Betsy received a B.A. in French from Wesleyan College in Macon, which was founded in 1836 and the first college in the western world chartered to grant degrees to women. She would receive an M.A. in English from Vermont College in 1984.

Betsy married her home-town sweetheart, Gilliam Clark Jr., in June of 1956. He had just finished an engineering degree at Georgia Tech and was a recently commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy. During his time in the service, they lived on a series of naval bases, including at Norfolk, Virginia, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Following Gilliam’s discharge in 1958, they settled in Detroit, where Gilliam worked in the automobile industry.

By the early 1960s they had four children—Gil III, Beth, John, and Tim—and the marriage was souring. They divorced in 1966, and Betsy began teaching English in the Auburn Heights School District, near Pontiac, at the elementary level. There she met Barbara Vedder, a fellow member of the faculty who was also recently divorced with three children of her own—Kurt, Jill, and Lee.

The Clarks and the Vedders became so close that following a fire in the Clark house in 1968, they decided to combine families in the Vedder home, a sprawling manse on Vhay Lake in Bloomfield Hills, just opposite the Bloomfield Open Hunt Club.

This unconventional arrangement—two divorcees sharing a bedroom and seven lively children roving the environs—met with some apprehension in the staid neighborhood. However, next-door neighbor Bill Davidson—CEO of Guardian Industries and soon-to-be owner of the Detroit Pistons basketball team—delighted in the menagerie, often swinging the bat during games of 500 with all seven children in his back yard or taking the entire

household to Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour and encouraging one of the kids to pretend it was their birthday to ensure they got the full treatment from the staff. (Bill eventually had a son and daughter of his own, one of whom became a student of Betsy’s.)

During summers in these years, Betsy and Barbara were administrators at a day camp at Upland Hills Farm, in Oxford, while the kids were either campers or counsellors. Founded by educational progressives Knight and Dorothy Webster and run with the help of their children Ken, Steve and his wife Leslie, Bruce, and Pam, this institution would eventually include a school and an Ecological Awareness Center. As teenagers, Betsy’s sons and daughter worked year-round at the farm driving draft horses pulling wagons and sleighs full of weekend visitors. The Webster family were dear friends throughout Betsy’s life.

In September of 1968, Betsy began teaching English at Brookside School Cranbrook. In 1972, following four years with the Vedder family, both in Bloomfield Hills and in Clarkston, she moved with her children onto the Cranbrook campus, to a house on Faculty Way. (Barbara eventually remarried her ex-husband, Dr. Robert Vedder, who became much loved in the extended family, and the Vedder and Clark children have remained de facto siblings to this day.)

With the exception of one regretful year in the mid-1980s working as a technical writer in Washington, D.C., Betsy would spend the rest of her career at the Cranbrook Educational Community. She taught at Brookside until 1981, when she moved to Kingswood Middle School, with the position of Assistant Dean added to her teaching responsibilities. In subsequent years she became Dean and eventually Head of Cranbrook Kingswood Girls’ Middle School, all while still teaching.

Although as an educator she could be intimidating, she nevertheless became beloved by generations of students, and many of them kept in regular contact with her long into their adulthoods. As the decades passed, students she taught in the ‘60s and ‘70s sent their children to her classrooms in the ‘80s and ‘90s. An impressive number of the girls who passed through her English classes are now writers and editors at some of the country’s most prestigious publications.

When Betsy retired from Cranbrook Kingswood in 1999, nostalgia for the South caused her to move back to Georgia. The experiment didn’t last. In the early 2000s she returned to Michigan to begin writing a history of Kingswood School, from its conception by Ellen Scripps Booth and George Booth in the 1920s to its merger with Cranbrook School in 1985.

Published in 2006 by the Cranbrook Press, Beside a Lake: A History of Kingswood School Cranbrook was among Betsy’s proudest accomplishments. Elegantly designed and illustrated,

it is a comprehensive account of the Booth’s vision, architect Eliel Saarinen’s mastery, and more than five decades of rich student life.

Betsy’s association with the schools did not end there. Now in her 70’s, she went to work under Director Darryl Taylor for Horizons Upward Bound (HUB), Cranbrook’s program to prepare Detroit-area students with limited opportunities for their college careers. She found it some of the most meaningful teaching she had ever done.

Betsy was still nominally working for HUB, though with reduced responsibilities, when just a handful of years ago a former student now employed at the schools noticed her on campus in the distance. Something seemed amiss, so she went out to her. She asked Betsy if she was all right, if she needed help. But Betsy was not all right. She was standing in a place that she had known and loved for nearly 50 years, she was standing beside Kingswood Lake, and she was lost.

Elizabeth Comer Clark was preceded in death by her brother Johnson Clark, son John Clark, and grandson Nicholas Clark. She is survived by her sons Gilliam Clark III of Mt. Clemens, MI, and Tim Clark of Juneau, AK; her daughter Elizabeth de Cesena (Manuel) of Fort Lauderdale, FL; her granddaughters Hanna Clark of Colorado Springs, CO, and Macie Clark of Pontiac, MI; and by the Vedder children Kurt of Cleveland, OH, Jill of Royal Oak, MI, and Lee of Ann Arbor, MI.

Her remains will rest at Christ Church Cranbrook.