Stephen C. Clark

Stephen Clark’s interests ranged far and wide, from the most modern phases of art to the antiquities of baseball. The most striking monuments to his memory are the celebrated Stephen C. Clark art collection, in which both Rembrandt and Picasso are represented, and the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, which contains eighty-four bronze plaques dedicated to heroes of the American game.

Our artist members cannot imagine how the Century Art Gallery could have got along through the last forty years without the help of Stephen Clark. As far back as most of us can remember he was on the Committee on Art and for many years he was in charge of the shows in the Gallery—balanced, imaginative exhibitions of painting and sculpture to which members were proud to bring their families and friends. He accepted no praise for this highly creative performance; he made a sharp distinction between talent and taste and would only admit to taste. “I have no talents,” he would say. “I don’t know very much. But I think I can recognize quality when I see it.”

For a hundred years the Clark family has been part of the American tradition. Without them the Singer Sewing Machine would not have been possible. The Singer Manufacturing Company, founded by Stephen’s father, Alfred Corning Clark, has penetrated every corner of the world. Like the American harvesting machinery and the cheap car, the civilizing effect of its product can scarcely be estimated; but this has been followed by the further civilizing effect of the wealth it produced. For the sons of Alfred Clark have been humanitarian givers, turning the fortune they inherited into widely flowing cultural channels.

Stephen chose Cooperstown, New York, as the headquarters of his activities. The people of the community and the farmers round about have long been familiar with the unassuming man in the threadbare coat rattling about in an old Chevvy, and they have known that everywhere he went he enriched the countryside. But no stranger would ever have recognized him as a person of great wealth. He seemed to give no thought to material things. His habits were almost Spartan: up at six in the morning, eating frugally and drinking more so; but the thing that most distinguished him from other rich men was the absence of any barrier between him and the humblest citizen—farmer or worker or ballplayer; caddy or water boy or housewife.

In upstate New York, his main concern was to preserve the grass-root artifacts of history and folklore and make them part of the continuing cultural stream. He was well aware of the prevailing syncopated American trend, the un fortunate tendency to forget the past in the intensity of the present—the interruptions of continuity in our review of nearly every progression. That was why he founded the Farmers’ Museum at Cooperstown, Fenimore House, which became the permanent headquarters of the State Historical Association and the Baseball Hall of Fame.

He unearthed what may have been a legend that baseball was first played on the near-by Abner Doubleday Field in 1839. He then began collecting ancient baseballs, bats, gloves, and mitts and later interested the President of the National League in housing these and the bronze plaques in a building for which he donated the funds. All this took him into the attics of humble collectors of all sorts of small things; these he brought into the open and assembled into their pattern of growth in the museums.

Stephen Clark graduated from Yale in 1903 and took his LL.B. at Columbia in 1907. In 1910 he was elected to the New York State Assembly. During the First World War, he was lieutenant colonel in the Adjutant General’s Department, a service for which he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. During the 1920’s he owned and published several newspapers in Albany. Then he took an active part in the family business as a member of its Board of Directors. He managed the family foundations, and through them—the Clark and Scriven Foundations—he established his humanitarian projects, including the one that was nearest his heart, the Mary Imogene Bassett Memorial Hospital in Coopers town, which is said to have set the standards for rural hospitals through the nation.

His interest in art led the Metropolitan Museum to make him a director, and he became also a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art. In 1957 Yale gave him the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.

In our special Centurion sense, Stephen Clark was a true amateur of the arts.

Roger Burlingame
1961 Century Association Yearbook