Mothers, please let your babies grow up to be journalists

You would never know it by watching him broadcast the news in Pittsburgh, or by sitting in on one of his classes at Duquesne University, or by listening to him narrate the election of a new pope, but there was a time, in his childhood, when news anchor Mike Clark had a difficult speech impediment.

He stuttered.  It got so bad that his older brothers, his school friends, even his Dad made fun of him.  “Just spit it out!” they would tell him.

“It was significant enough that I still remember my machine gun-like stammering,” he remembers, “and the searing heat filling up my cheeks and my ears when people would mock me.”  Tough going for a six-year-old.

Then something happened.  Young Mike was a first-grade student at St. Aidan’s School in Williston Park, New York, a Long Island suburb about 20 miles from midtown Manhattan. A Catholic nun named Sister Aileen was his teacher.  A lively volunteer teacher, one of the parish moms named Shirley, would often visit the class, reading to the children, singing songs, sometimes directing little classroom plays.

In one such play Shirley offered the lead role of Father Robin to a blue-eyed kid named Mike Clark.  “You have a beautiful voice,” she told him. His wife was played by little Ellen Ward, his children by Cathy Stalters and John Jacob. The role of evil Blue Jay was given to Dennis Redmond.  Mike Clark is 52-years-old now, but recites these names from yesteryear as if the play were yesterday. It would be his job to protect the nest of the Robins from attacks from the Blue Jay.

When Mike had landed the lead role, he rushed home to tell his mother Margie, who became quite concerned.  She knew Shirley from the Mother’s Club and the Rosary Society and phoned her.  “You know Mike stutters,” she explained, “and I wouldn’t want the other kids to make fun of him.”  Whatever Shirley told Margie, Mike’s mom was persuaded that everything would work out.  And it did, in ways that no one could have imagined.

“It was an important experience in my life,” writes Mike in an email message. “The fact that I remember everything in great detail is one indication…  Because I was suddenly ‘the voice’ I had an identity.  After the play, my classmates looked up to me.  I could feel their acceptance.  From then on, I always wanted to read clearly and do my best with my voice.  I was chosen to read at Masses.  I read the morning announcements.  I introduced guests at school assemblies.  More plays.”

Shirley, he says, “put me on the path. How did she do it?  Why did she do it?  I don’t know. She must have loved challenges.  And she surely must have loved me.  Seeing something in me that she could mold into a better version of who I was.”

I learned this story at the recent wake of my mother — Shirley Clark.  She died at the age of 95 on Friday, March 13, and many of her friends and admirers came to the wake and funeral to testify to how she “changed children’s lives.”

Wakes and funerals, of course, are not for the dead but for the living. The sons and daughters of those who have passed away get to listen to the legacies of parents, learning, sometimes to their surprise, that moms and dads lived lives that transcended those of their offspring.

So Margie Clark (no relation), Mike’s mom, came to the wake to tell us a story of Shirley’s legacy, about how she transformed her son’s speech from a curse into a blessing. So if the citizens of the great city of Pittsburgh are satisfied with the quality of broadcast news in the Steel City, they have my mommy to thank for it.

For the record, Mike Clark has anchored the news at WTAE in Pittsburgh since 1995.  He has won countless honors for his work, including Emmy Awards and an honorary doctorate.  As a good Catholic boy, he has developed a special knowledge of the papacy and has done distinguished field reporting on each of the last three popes. He will, no doubt, play a key role in the coverage of the first visit of Pope Francis to the United States.  My mom, of course, would have loved that.

And so let it be known across the land on this Mothers Day that it is still a good thing for mothers, for teachers, to help their children find their voices. Who knows, maybe they will grow up to be journalists.