Elizabeth McClard

I married a poet and itinerant worker the fall following graduation and went to the University of MT in Missoula part-time while waitressing for a year. I got into Wellesley College (by measure of mystery) the following year, but deferred entrance for one year while continuing to work. My husband took a job in a coal mine in Colstrip, MT to make more money so I could go to school in the East. I went ahead to college and he later joined me. We found I could go to school for free if he took a job at the college, which he did. He worked in both the janitorial staff and the groundskeeping staff while I was enrolled. Sadly, that marriage did not last, but I fell in love with a math professor at the school. We had a baby there and were asked, the two of us, to move on.

Fortunately, my husband had many talents besides teaching and I largely followed him in his several careers for the next seventeen years. (He was a professor, academic dean, director of the Southern California Earthquake Preparedness Project, IBM engineer, tech company management and executive in many companies, venture capitalist, and currently an entrepreneur in a supercomputing company based on some math he whipped up in his spare time over the last thirty years). We have moved ten times together, covering many states during that time, and several times with Carl commuting out-of-state to work. Some of our favorite places were Minnesota, Denver, New York and New Jersey. Some of our least favorites were Northern CA, Southern, CA (x2), MA (x3), and CT. I was largely a stay-at-home mother over the years, sometimes contributing a little to the home coffers by running cottage industry businesses from my home--first baby-care paraphernalia, and later music and art software-- and sometimes by selling real estate, at which I very much sucked. I was almost always involved in some aspect of home building or renovation.

As my first child went off to college and my second was getting there I decided to find a real career. After discovering that I had been harboring a latent interest in medicine all of my life I took some premed and then got into med school at University of Colorado in Denver. I became a Board certified family physician with a specialization in hospital medicine (before there was any such stated specialty). I have recently retired from doctoring to move with my husband to be closer to our children and now grandchildren who live in the midwest, in Saint Louis and Chicago. I am again building a house, but am also a volunteer reader to children, a native plants enthusiast involved in restoring some native prairie and woodland of MO, and dreaming of things big and little to spend my personal end-times on. I remain an opinionated cuss.

I was little involved at school, so probably very few knew or would remember me, unless by virtue of the fact that I was never shy in class. Besides the fact that I worked full-time at Jimmy's Restaurant, right across the street from the high school after school, I was quite shy then and took lunches by myself in the park behind the high school. I did try, but could not get any boys in my class interested enough to take me out. I was never invited to a game or a dance or to anyone's house except for to those of two of the three other kids in my Latin class, and they were both a year behind me. I also took piano lessons from one of them (Nick Olcott), and he was a very good friend to me. I had a crush on John Nicholson and was looking forward to seeing him, but alas, I see he died just last year. Life is so short.

I do have one and only one story from school I thought and still think funny. Nick Olcott was an aspiring thespian (and boy, has he succeeded!) He once dragged me into a statewide acting competition where we signed up to put on a vignette from "Barefoot in the Park." I thought the play, and we in particular, utterly absurd, and actually AWFUL, but we won something (second? maybe even first?) I was so embarrassed and he was so proud. I understand now that I totally did not get how something so campy could be funny, an appreciation I was slow to come by, but the memory of engaging with him and of being with other aspiring actors on a bus, that single experience of pretending to be grown-ups, with my peers, remains very sweet to me.