Clark Macomber was born October 2, 1930, in Chicago to William and Dorothy (Wiltz) Macomber. He was delivered by the Cubs team doctor, John Davis, who shared some gossip with our grandmother about Hack Wilson’s drinking while she was in labor. Thus began our family’s personal Cubs curse. Clark would later work for the Wrigley organization when it was the umbrella for both the Cubs and the Bears in the 1940’s, shooting the teams’ training films with his father.
This was just one of many varied jobs he had in his youth including clerking for the local hobby shop and railroad line maintenance in Indiana. Clark loved the opportunities these jobs gave him to meet people different from those he knew; his whole life he showed these strangers what his family could have difficulty seeing, which was his genuine ability to set his ego aside in order to let someone else in.
“May you be cursed to live in interesting times.” He told me that when I was very young. I never forgot it, and I quoted it back to him a lot, especially in the past few years. Clark never stopped responding to the world around him with curiosity, engagement and the ability to find patterns, and thus beauty, whether in a robin on his porch or one of the many problems he sought out and prided himself on solving before (or better than) you did.
Clark spent his early years with his family, including younger brother Richard, in the Rogers Park neighborhood on the north side of Chicago. His parents then moved further up the north shore to suburban Winnetka, where he attended—with some notoriety--New Trier High School. After graduation he went to Northwestern, entering the famous Drama School (for no other reason we could figure out than his looks). There he met actors with real talent who would become famous, and got invited to freaky parties on Chicago’s North Side (the Gold Coast, not Wrigleyville).
Fun as all this was (and the stories he told leave no doubt about that), he knew acting was not his calling. After a year he transferred to the renowned Institute of Design in downtown Chicago, where he majored in mechanical engineering.
At ID he met another transfer student from Northwestern Drama School, Judy Mason of Evanston, Illinois. They had just started seeing each other when Clark got drafted into the Army. They exchanged longing, highly literate, and often dauntingly technical (when it came to camera equipment) letters throughout his deployment to Korea. He served under fire on the front lines. The main and enduring lesson he drew from his military stint? The endlessly fascinating variety of the people he got to know.
Back stateside Clark returned to studies at ID. In November 1954 he married Judith Ann Mason. As kids we were obsessed with our parents’ wedding album. They looked like movie stars, those two gorgeous young people; Mom, actress that she was, expressed all the ineffable worldliness of a suburban 21-year-old just the way she held her post-nuptial cigarette, while Daddy looked protective and proud.
Their first daughter Megan arrived in January 1956. Clark responded to his new role with enthusiasm. Taking as his philosophy that children, even babies, are individual people to get to know (and impress), he took her with him on photography outings and taught her to identify and name every car they saw. He would repeat this pattern of instruction with Sheila and Brigit, spaced three years apart.
He reinforced this learning with daily quizzes. Anyone who knew Clark well was routinely subjected to a version of his quizzes. You’d be talking about a movie you both loved, one that inevitably dated to before your birth and occasionally his as well. Just as you were congratulating yourself for remembering who directed it and what year it came out, you’d hear the dreaded words “Quick! Who plays the Dowager?”
My father gave me many things, but the neurotic impulse to prevent others from finding gaps in my knowledge ranks high on the list. Learn everything. Remember all of it. He managed to conceal, from child-me at least, that although he conveyed the impression of knowing it all (and being a know-it-all), he himself had enormous gaps; he had never tried to learn everything, it was just that the things he knew he knew extraordinarily well, and his memory excelled beyond mine or anyone else’s I know--except Sheila, who seems to have inherited hers “from the Macomber side.”
Until 1960 he worked for Bell & Howell as a product designer. Years later he supplemented expert testimony to the Warren Commission about one of the cameras he had designed there, the Model 414 PD Bell & Howell Zoomatic Director Series Camera – made famous by Abraham Zapruder when he captured the Kennedy assassination. In 1961 Clark started teaching at NCSU in Raleigh in the department of design.
Clark loved teaching. He was one of those rare “born teachers”; it tempered his habitual didacticism with the goal of instruction, and allowed his ability and desire to connect personally with everyone he met to serve a professional purpose. Why didn’t he stay in the field? He always blamed a “publish or perish” standard, but in later years he would in fact publish a number of pieces in magazines; he may not have realized how easily someone with his talents could have met that standard. Rather than trying, he railed against it. What makes the difference between the person who tries and the one who doesn’t? Confidence. It was the one thing he couldn’t construct out of arguments.
Ironically, it was during this time in the South that he started laying the groundwork for rebuilding himself. In his later years he often gave credit to a young psychiatrist he saw in Raleigh for helping him gain some perspective on his crippling insecurity. It is unusual even now for an apparently functional young family man (in North Carolina, no less) to seek out and be receptive to therapy. We didn’t realize then that it was virtually unheard of. That therapeutic relationship was brief; we moved back North a few months before JFK was assassinated. But Clark took what he received during these sessions and used it for the rest of his life: almost sixty years.
Clark and his family returned to Winnetka, where Clark’s parents still lived. He and Judy soon bought a house on Oak Street, within walking distance of the elementary and junior high schools and the then-modest shopping district. For over a decade he worked at a series of jobs, first as a product designer at American Can Company and Montgomery Ward, later behind the counter at Altman Camera, where he considered his talents wasted.
That sentiment was not expressed only about Altman.
Clark had imbibed a philosophy of design at ID: “form follows function.” But his own aesthetic sense would never allow him to leave it at that. He had a career of visionary design work undermined by difficult relationships. He tended to chafe at what he perceived as the limitations of his bosses, while those bosses struggled to figure out how to work with him.
His lifelong passion was the intersection of history and modes of transportation. In the golden age of hobby shops and model building, Clark developed a fascination with not just assembling WWII fighter planes from store-bought kits, but researching the aircrafts’ histories and designing models himself. Always convinced he could improve on what was available, he sought out examples wherever he could track them down and reproduced them with an almost fanatic attention to detail, rivet by rivet by rivet.
He was an omnivorous model builder. He built trains for his daughters, crafted every variant of a P51 fighter plane, and spent road trips seeking out vintage Corvettes to photograph from every conceivable (and physically possible) angle. He spent what seemed like years cutting the skeleton of a radio-controlled aircraft out of balsa wood, gluing it together and finally stretching over it a skin of sheer silk in his favorite color, orange. I think that one crashed on its first flight. We found this tragedy incomprehensible; Daddy seemed to take it in stride.
That happens with RC, he told us. Clark grew very involved with the Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA) flying RC models and judging the AMA’s national competitions each summer, eventually rising to head judge. The sunburns he sustained every summer during these week-long competitions would lead to one of his only health issues when, in his 60s, he developed skin cancer on his nose. After minor surgery and a skin graft he was pronounced cured but warned to never get sunburned again.
For years he pursued these projects on his own time. Calling them a hobby would misrepresent their centrality to his life, but he didn’t earn money doing it. This changed finally in 1976 when Monogram Models hired him. Finally: he was getting paid to do what he loved. Recognition, too! Something he continued to reap until his final days on the Monogram Models Facebook page.
Clark being Clark, the course would be pocked with rivalry, some hurt feelings, and a period of drifting between jobs and “finding himself.” The culmination of the latter process was his and Judith’s divorce, in 1983. During this latter part of his life he struggled consciously to consolidate the message he had gotten years earlier from that psychiatrist in Raleigh, to trust his own perceptions and move beyond the stage of battling constantly for validation.
In 1984 Clark married Maya Sandler, an engineer he had met at Monogram. Maya, a widow from Odessa (then in the USSR), Ukraine, relied on Clark to help her learn the nuances of English; she tried to teach him Russian, but he did not prove nearly as adept at mastering a new language as she did. They lived in Wilmette, Illinois, before moving to Charlotte when Clark joined the fledgling Accurate Miniatures company. He never stopped designing models . . . or building things . . . or tackling projects.
The influence of Maya, her daughter Lilia, and later Lilia’s two daughters with her husband Yoav Caplan, Zoe and Ella, seemed to draw Clark out of the ancient shell he had developed in childhood and hardened in his first marriage. Clark’s later years were marked by an emotional openness and a vulnerability he had never shown when he was younger. He asked family members how they were doing, and actually listened to what they said in reply. Yes, he had his rants: blue states should just cut off the red states and keep their tax dollars to themselves! People never vote their self-interest! Get rid of the Department of Education! Everyone who knew him, definitely everyone who loved him, got treated to at least one of these.
After Maya died in October, 2018, Clark was truly alone for the first time in his life. Aside from his ghostly cat Benzie, he had no family in Charlotte. Although he complained about the limitations of phone conversations, he reached out often to relatives and friends all over the country, even the world. These (mostly) brief conversations sustained connections to those he valued and kept him from sinking into isolation. He seemed finally to understand that conversations meant give and take. Even when he was recovering from the first really serious illness of his long life, in early 2019, he would end phone calls by urging “Take care of yourself.”
He spoke often of the curiosity that motivated him, whether to read or to strike up conversations with strangers. Clark wanted to learn about the world, but more than anything he wanted to learn what the world thought about him. Clark pretended never to have solved what he called “the mystery” of his own mind. He spent his final decades recruiting us into the project of marveling at his ability to recognize patterns. In one of our last conversations, he wanted to know how novelists build characters. Except that he didn’t really want to know; he wanted to tell me his thoughts (in this case about Dickens’ Little Dorrit) and elicit my admiration for what he called his “layman’s” stab at my own field.
He loved provoking people. Starting arguments gave him the chance to bring forth his typically well-rehearsed opinions, which he delivered as facts. His arguments were always extremely rational, or they sounded that way because of his command of language. If he could bait you into engaging even one of his sub-points, he could deliver his soliloquy on the topic du jour. We all had to learn the Clark Techniques: change the subject, tell him directly you didn’t want to argue about Obama (again), or take a deep breath, abandon all hope and dive in. There was no winning an argument with Clark.
“May you be cursed to live in interesting times.” 1930-2020. What a lifespan—interesting times indeed. But what was so enviable about Clark was that he met “interesting” with “interested.” Until he died he maintained the rare dual role in life’s pageant, of both participant and spectator, always engaged, not detached; but nonetheless able to sustain a perspective on all of it. He could be very wrong. He could be prescient in the extreme. But he paid attention, he took it all in, and he thought about it. And he wanted us to think about it, and carry on.
Clark is survived by daughters Megan Macomber (John Christie), Sheila Macomber, and Brigit Macomber, step-daughter Lilia Sanders, granddaughters Zoe and Ella Caplan, and brother Richard Macomber (Lenore Baker). He is predeceased by his wife Maya, his former wife Judith Mason Macomber, his parents William Macomber and Dorothy Wiltz Macomber, and his beloved cat Benzie.
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