Catherine ‘Kit’ Clark was shown riding in a Jeep in the 1972 Dorchester Day Parade. Photo courtesy Chris Lovett

The Reporter first published this retrospective on the life of Catherine Forbes ‘Kit’ Clark in 2003.

It’s a sunny day in June, 1972, a couple of weeks before Catherine Forbes “Kit” Clark has turns fifty-three. As a community leader for more than a decade, she has a place of honor in the Dorchester Day Parade. Like other local dignitaries, she could have passed by unremarkably in a convertible. Instead, there’s the photograph her friends and relatives still talk about more than thirty years later.

The photo shows her standing in a jeep. Behind her, at the wheel, is a man in a soldier’s uniform and helmet, looking straight ahead. She waves and smiles to one side of Dorchester Avenue, seemingly toward someone she recognizes. It’s a look a political candidate might envy: no hint of posturing, just the thrill of the moment, as if riding down the avenue in a jeep were cause for triumph.

In a way it was. Looking at the photo in a newspaper clipping, her daughter, Betty Shorr, remembers there really had been a convertible her mother left behind that Dorchester Day. By switching to a ride with less pomp, Kit Clark had stepped into character. And she could, in turn, be recognized by her power to transform her surroundings. Even the jeep would, in Betty Shorr’s words, become “Kit’s limousine.”

More than most people who manage to win elective office, Kit Clark left an impression on Dorchester. The name of John F. Kennedy may be associated with a presidential library and a Red Line station, and that of Pope John Paul II with a riverfront park, but three places carry her name: an athletic center at UMass. Boston, an elderly housing development on Edison Green, and the city’s largest social service agency for the elderly, based in Fields Corner. She played decisive and formative role in each of these, but she is also credited with grasping how they were all connected.

As a civic leader, she created connections among neighborhoods in Dorchester and with the powers outside. As a Republican, she ran against Robert Quinn, a Democratic state representative who would eventually become Speaker of the House and State Attorney General. But she also campaigned for bringing the Kennedy Library to Dorchester, and, in some ways, was even an apostle of the “Great Society,” that most liberal Democratic vision of a better life through activist government.

And, at a time when Dorchester was often viewed as a place of decline and division, Clark could a see a better future, whether in an elderly nutrition site, a state college at Columbia Point or the renovation of an old movie house in Uphams Corner. That was when Clark spurred Dolores Miller, a neighbor and fellow activist from Savin Hill, to marshal her organizational and musical background for revival of the Strand Theater.

“We firmly believed, though things were tough in those days, the turn-around was going to happen, and the Strand was going to be part of it,” said Miller. “Kit got the big picture.”

“She had a voice that people really heard,” said Sandra Albright, the current executive director of Kit Clark Senior Services. Albright got to know Clark in the 1970’s at the Little House social service center on East Cottage Street. Albright was a new staff member and Clark was president of the Little House Community Advisory Board.

“She understood the community, the programs that kids and seniors needed, and she knew how to advocate for that,” said Albright. “And she didn’t tolerate fools at all.”

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The big picture begins with the smaller circle of the family. A resident of Savin Hill Avenue for nearly all her life, Kit Clark was born in 1919, the youngest of four children. Both her parents were immigrants: a mother from Northern Ireland who died when Kit was six, and a father from Scotland who was a carpenter. After her mother died, there was an aunt who helped raise the family. According to Betty Shorr, she was also the first of many relatives and non-relatives who would be members of Kit’s extended family.

“She was always had love around her,” said Shorr.

There was also tennis, starting right down the street with the courts at the foot of Savin Hill. This was the beginning of a dedication to youth sports that would continue to the end of her life.

After graduating from Jeremiah E. Burke High School, Clark attended Burroughs Business School. She was married at age 23 and went to live for two years in California. Divorced after three years of marriage, she returned to Dorchester with Betty. Sharing part of their childhood home with her father, Clark began her life as a single mother with a fulltime job, making $35.00 a week.

“She had a tough time,” said Shorr. “She was always there when I needed her, whether it was a school project of a visit to the doctor.”

“She would get up at seven o’clock in the morning, bring me down to the nursery school, get on the subway and pick me up six-thirty at night,” Shorr recalled. “Her time was spent working and parenting, and playing tennis whenever possible.”

Clark would eventually become officer manager for Allied Appliances in Brookline. It was a position that, as Shorr noted, put her in “a man’s world.” She also remembers her mother as someone who “worked well with men,” whether in her business or civic life.

“She could deal with them on their level if she had to do it, but there was never any time when she wasn’t respected,” said Shorr. “She did what she had to. She was just so straightforward, you always knew where you were with her, and she had a wonderful sense of humor.”

It was the presidential campaign of Dwight D. Eisenhower that brought Clark into the world of electoral politics and civic activism.

“She loved him,” said Shorr, who joined along with her mother for pre-election caravans and rallies at locations such as the G & G Delicatessen on Blue Hill Avenue.

“I think she really found her voice,” said Shorr. “That’s what she did.”

She also found herself a Republican candidate for state representative in an overwhelmingly Democratic ward. In 1962, while she was on the ballot against Quinn, a weekly newspaper carried a photo of her with Republican Governor John Volpe, who would also lose that year. In the words of her campaign press release, Clark was against “corruption in government,” while favoring better recreational facilities for youth and better service on the old “MTA.”

In an interview in 2000, Quinn said there was little active campaigning, recalling her candidacy as that of a “sacrificial lamb” intended to bring out a few more votes for the statewide ticket.

“The campaign was the least part of working with Kit,” said Quinn, who passed away last January at age 85.

“She was a neighborhood person all her life. She didn’t just come out of the woodwork at election time,” he said. “She was a tough adversary, but I enjoyed working with her because she made you work.”

Another former state representative from the neighborhood, James Brett, says Clark advised him to make his way toward electoral politics through involvement in the Columbia-Savin Hill Civic Assn.

“She knew the process but was very savvy in knowing the issues and how to organize around the issues,” said Brett.

“She was not an elected official,” he emphasized. “She was a community leader, and she took great pride in that role and she was very effective.”

Among Clark’s first concerns as a member of the Columbia-Savin Hill Civic Association were improvements to the Savin Hill tennis courts and the addition of basketball courts.

“The youth was so important to her,” said Shorr, “her involvement with the youth in the area and trying to keep them occupied.”

Another neighborhood activist from those years, Richard Finnigan, remembers working with Clark on Fourth of July events around the courts to provide activities for youth and to raise money for athletic equipment. Clark would later speak in support of Finnigan at a caucus of Savin Hill Democrats trying to regain Quinn’s former seat from an incumbent who lived in a part of Ward 13 outside the neighborhood. Finnigan said the oddity of a Republican in a huddle Democrats had to be explained.

“Somebody said to Mrs. Clark, ‘This is a Democratic field of candidates and you’re a Republican. Are you going to work for the Democratic candidate?’” said Finnigan. “’Let me tell you, sonny,’ she said, ‘I’m a Republican, but I’m not a dumb Republican.’”

Finnigan said he chose her to be his advocate because she would put her support for him “right on the table.”

“I knew what type of a woman she was,” said Finnigan. “She was a fighter.”

Around the same time, civic leaders were also giving attention to future uses of the old Mile Road Dump on the Columbia Point Peninsula, formerly known as the Calf Pasture. To their relief, plans for a World’s Fair never materialized. Then came plans to use the location for UMass. Boston’s Harbor Campus. There were mixed feelings, with some fearing an influx of students in the Dorchester housing market and others seeing better access to education and potential for partnerships with the community.

Finnigan would be among those going to UMass. for study, returning to school at age sixty. A runner-up in competition at the New Boston Open Tennis Tournament in the early 1970’s, and the first female member of the Dorchester Yacht Club, Clark also saw the potential for a campus recreation center that would be available to residents of Columbia-Savin Hill and Columbia Point. Many remember her determined push for the facility after she had been appointed to the UMass. Board of Trustees by Republican Governor Frank Sargent. During a period of fiscal austerity, when Sargent’s Democratic successor, Michael Dukakis, put a freeze on new construction, Clark persisted.

“That was her fight. She took on the governor, the head of the Board of Trustees,” said Finnigan. “But her allegiance was totally with the community, and anything she felt the community should have, she fought like hell to make sure they’d get it.”

Civic leaders say a similar drive was behind her efforts to help redevelop dilapidated buildings on Edison Green as an elderly housing development. To make this happen, she worked through Columbia-Savin Hill Neighborhood Housing Services, which used revolving loans to help with the cost of home improvements. She’s credited with a timely heads-up to have an appeal for the project’s funding to a federal official just before his retirement.

She also pitched in to help clear the way for a criminal justice program a UMass student, Bill Walczak, was trying to start at Dorchester District Court. He took his idea from a neighborhood meeting, where someone had complained about repeat offenders who repeatedly failed to pay court costs or fines. As an alternative, Walczak proposed having them pay in hours of community service, such as cleanup duty in parks.

With encouragement from one of judges at the court, Walczak made a presentation to the presiding justice, Paul King. The brother of a future governor, the judge would be remembered for his sometimes abrasive manner, especially with women. After hearing Walczak’s presentation, King refused to go along.

“I then immediately went over to see Kit in what's now the Log School and told her what happened,” Walczak wrote, “and she said, ‘Oh, is that what he said?’ Then she picked up the phone, told the court, ‘This is Kit Clark. I want to talk with Paul King.’ She was put immediately through to him, and then said, ‘Paul, I have this Bill Walczak here, who has a great idea about putting offenders to work cleaning our parks, and he said you didn't support it. We need this, Paul.’ King immediately changed his mind. Kit said something like ‘thanks,’ hung up, and said, ‘Go back to Paul King. He now supports the program.’ The time from when I met with Paul and he rejected the idea, to when he agreed to allow the program was about two hours. Kit later donated tools for the program. That program still operates at the Court and has produced millions of dollars in free labor, cleaning parks, playgrounds, streets, fixing up public buildings, and other work.”

Clark’s role in the community has also been described as bridge-building. That could mean building connections to power outside the community, as when she brought US Senator Ed Brooke to visit classes at the Little House, or when invited neighbors to mingle with candidates at the annual cookouts in her yard. Another kind bridge-building took place during the turbulent first years of school desegregation. That was when she rode on buses that took predominantly white students from Columbia-Savin Hill to schools in predominantly black neighborhoods.

“She was a very calming influence in the community around volatile issues,” said Albright.

During the same period, Mayor Kevin White named Clark to a committee that would try to help defuse racial tensions. Shorr also remembers joining her mother in a march for peace in downtown Boston in the spring of 1976, after racial attacks pushed the city near the boiling point.

Clark’s successor at the elderly service program that grew out of Federated Dorchester Neighborhood Houses (FDNH), Joseph Doolin, says she believed in breaking down barriers on many fronts, whether by age, race or gender. That was how he explained her opposition to a new senior housing development once proposed to replace the public housing at Columbia Point. Currently the president of Catholic Charities, Doolin said the nutrition program Clark was recruited to run for FDNH— an organization that has since been re-named as College Bound Dorchester— would use meals as a way to put the elderly in touch with other services, especially health care.

“What we really needed was a community organizer who was a neighborhood face, an individual who was close to being a senior and who could make outreach more acceptable, not as a poor person’s soup kitchen, but as a place to come together for sociability and food,” said Doolin. “It ratcheted up the dignity of the experience.”

The program would eventually grow to serve 8,000 people a year spread over 70 percent of Boston.

“She was astute enough to know there was going to be a sea change in how seniors were seen in this country,” said Albright.

By going to work for FDNH, Clark was also going from the threshold of management in the private sector to the often less remunerative non-profit social service sector.

“I think it would be a natural step for someone whose whole life was consumed by community services,” said Miller, adding, “She didn’t need to be trained. She knew what she was walking into.”

Clark was named director of the FDNH Senior Services Program in February, 1977. At the time, she was ill with cancer. Later that year, she would see the groundbreaking for the Kennedy Library and relish the rare convergence of prominent Democrats, including members of the Kennedy family and Speaker of the US House, John McCormack. Before her death, she would also get word from Dorchester’s State Representative John Finnegan, at the time the head of the Ways and Means Committee, about funding for the athletic center at UMass.

Not unlike the elderly served by her program, Clark was determined in her last days to be as close to the community as possible. Shorr brought her home from the hospital, setting up a bedroom on the first floor. Clark was back on Savin Hill Avenue, in the home which had also served as a command center for neighborhood activists—complete with a view of Dorchester Bay and the gas tanks on Commercial Point. She also kept busy with her work for FDNH.

“She was at it up until the very, very end,” said Doolin. Shorr says her mother “never gave into” putting her work aside.

“I want to say, but I don’t think she ever made peace with letting go,” said Shorr.

Because of her upbringing as a Congregationalist, Doolin recalled being surprised when he visited her once and saw a crucifix on the wall opposite the bed. Shorr describes it as a “beautifully decorated” antique which had been left in the house by someone else. Doolin says when he asked Clark to explain it, she said, “’I thought I’d learn about suffering first-hand.’”

A woman who traveled around the city without a purse, Clark also stood out for her behavior at meetings. She would tell speakers to “make it brief” or say something even more blunt. When a UMass Boston representative kept going on about his former life in the neighborhood, Clark cut him off by asking, “Why did you move out of Dorchester?”

Shorr says another of her mother’s pastimes at meetings was doodling. She still keeps one sheet of paper with graceful pen strokes that multiply in widening rows of diamond shapes. Shorr says they look “almost spiritual.” It’s hard to tell if the doodling was a way for Clark to get her mind off the meeting, or to concentrate on something. It could even have been that her mind was on some future appointment, which is why Shorr couldn’t help but notice at the bottom of the same page her mother had written, “November 14,” the date of her death.

People who knew Kit Clark also speak of her role in community as continuing. Shorr sees it in the people who carry on her work in elderly services. Brett sees her as a model for a community leader of his own generation. Albright imagines Clark using her powers of advocacy to fight budget cuts, though some might also picture her at election time shepherding a Mitt Romney through Ward 13.

“Being a party person, she probably would,” said Brett. “But, if she were taking him around, she was probably educating him on the issues that were important to Dorchester. That’s what she would take advantage of—educating him in the issues that were important to the people of Dorchester.”

Clark is also measured by her absence. Thinking of the abortive proposal for dormitories at the Harbor Campus, Dolores Miller imagines how there might have been less rancor between the community and UMass if there still had been a comparable successor from Dorchester on the university’s board of trustees.

“The process broke down,” said Miller. “We need a voice like hers again.”