Re: Jerry Clack

He did a lot of good work.  Sorry to learn this news.

Dan

On Sun, Apr 21, 2019 at 1:48 PM Thomas Scanlon <[email protected]>
wrote:

> I was very sad to learn of the recent passing of Jerry Clack, my
> undergraduate mento at Duquesne University and friend for over 50 years
> since. He fit 4 or 5 lives into 1. Here is the obituary from today's
> Pittsburgh Post Gazette.
>
> Atque in perpetuum, frāter, avē atque valē.
>
> JERRY CLACK
>
> Classics professor, opera lover and old-world gentleman
>
> July 22, 1926 - April 15, 2019
>
> BY ROBERT CROAN PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE
> In a career that lasted over 70 years, Jerry Clack wore many hats.
>
> From a youthful stint at the Swedish Legation in Washington and four years
> with UNESCO, to public relations and accounting positions with AAA,
> Coca-Cola and the American Heart Association, he went on to assume
> directorship of Allegheny County’s chapter of The March of Dimes in 1953.
> His 15-year tenure with March of Dimes saw the development of two
> anti-polio vaccines, that of Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh and
> Albert Sabin’s oral vaccine.
>
> But it was in the world of academics that Mr. Clack was widely known,
> especially in the instruction of the Classics.
>
> Mr. Clack died Monday at Shadyside Hospital due to heart failure. He was
> 92.
>
> The son of Mildred Taylor Van Dyke of Pittsburgh and Christopher Thrower
> Clack of Boydton, Va., Mr. Clack was born in New York City on July 22,
> 1926. Because his father was a foreign representative of the
> Pittsburgh-based Blaw-Knox Co., he spent his early years in Europe, mostly
> in London and Dusseldorf. After his father’s death, he returned with his
> mother to Pittsburgh, attending the Fulton School and Peabody High School.
>
> Upon gaining admission to Princeton University, where he received an
> undergraduate degree in Classics in 1946, he pursued graduate work at the
> University of Pittsburgh, earning a Ph.D. in Classics in 1962. In 1968, Mr.
> Clack was appointed professor of Classic Languages at Duquesne University,
> chairing the Classics Department from 1973-75 and again from 1980-83.
> Referring to his Latin class at Duquesne, one student posted on
> ratemyprofessors.com: “Take him, he makes his classes short and funny.”
>
> Mr. Clack’s sense of humor endeared him to his friends and family. “He was
> one of those people with a wicked sense of humor, sometimes a little
> black,” said Mark Mazur, a mathematics professor at Duquesne and close
> friend of Mr. Clack’s. “He was very clever, plays on words and so forth.
> That was his trademark.”
>
> He also published widely in the field. In addition to scholarly articles,
> he produced four textbooks on the subject of Hellenistic poetry and
> epigrams. He won numerous awards for his scholarly research, but his first
> love was opera — first and foremost the operas of Wagner and Richard
> Strauss. He made annual visits to the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Germany,
> called himself an opera fanatic and prided himself on a record collection
> that included at least one version of every opera available on CD, tape or
> DVD.
>
> After his retirement from Duquesne in 2011, Mr. Clack pursued his lifelong
> interest in opera by becoming a board member of what is now Pittsburgh
> Festival Opera, this city’s smaller but highly active opera company.
> Eventually elected chairman of the board, Mr. Clack created and underwrote
> an annual Richard Strauss festival, which began with a revival of “Ariadne
> auf Naxos” in 2014. The Strauss Festival has produced local premieres of
> neglected or unfamiliar works by his favorite composer every year since.
>
> “As chairman of the board meetings, he would open the meetings not with a
> tedious discussion of the budget or programming but by giving us a little
> lecture on some arcane portion of the operatic repertoire,” said Jonathan
> Eaton, artistic director of Pittsburgh Festival Opera. “Some might look at
> him and think of him as an eccentric, but he wasn’t. He was very
> passionate, and he wasn’t afraid of his passions.”
>
> In 2017, Mr. Clack put up money for a matching grant that would fund a
> revival of Festival Opera’s mini-version of Wagner’s “Ring” Cycle, created
> for the company by British composer Jonathan Dove 10 years earlier. This
> revival began in 2018 with “Der Ring des Nibelungen” and will continue with
> one opera each summer and culminate with the entire four-opera cycle in
> 2021.
>
> “He was an unusual man,” said Mildred Miller Posvar, 94, co-founder of
> Festival Opera and a former Metropolitan Opera star. “He was wonderful,
> with his dry wit and his lectures at the board meetings. It’s a great loss.”
>
> Mr. Clack was also a political activist for liberal causes that included,
> among others, Citizens for Global Solution and the Pennsylvania Chapter of
> the ACLU. He is survived by his husband, Julian Gil, who lives in Shadyside.
>
> Mr. Clack wished that his epitaph be a farewell used by actors in Roman
> comedies:
> Nunc, spectatores, valete et nobis clare plaudite. Now, spectators, fare
> you well, and give us loud applause.
>
> Robert Croan is a Post-Gazette senior editor. Staff writer Jeremy Reynolds
> contributed.
>