HAMILTON CLARK MY DEAR FRIEND AND SAILING BUDDY Ham Clark was my sailboat racing buddy. I think it was in 1968 that someone in our neighborhood in Saratoga California suggested that I might crew for Ham on his 18 foot Mercury sailboat. At the time I had a couple of small boats that my sons and I built and played around on. I had not sailed a real boat and was very interested in the suggestion. At the time I was 42 and Ham was about 50. This is pretty late in life to become racing sailors, but we had a ball. He owned the boat for a year or so before, and had begun racing with the peninsula fleet. For the next five years or so we raced Mercury 455. The better sailors learned as children, and essentially sailed “by the seat of their pants”. We, being middle aged when we started, had to approach the process from a more technical position. Ham was an electrical engineer and I was a chemist. We read books on sailing, and he even talked me into an exercise program to make our aging bodies more fit for the rigors of small boat sailing in boisterous San Francisco Bay and the other venues. Gradually, we moved from the back of the fleet to near the front. In our last attempt at the class championship we were in second place at the end of the second of the five race series. Ham started the third race on port tack. This is not the conventional method. Of course, he was not a believer in conventional wisdom in anything. While this characteristic served him well in his profession where he had to solve unusual and difficult problems, as well in his artistic hobbies, it didn’t work that day as we fouled another boat and were disqualified in that race. In a no-throw-out five race series a disqualification is the kiss of death. Still, we arrived near the front of the fleet. Our mission of learning to sail and sail well had been accomplished

Please let me digress a bit, and talk about the sport of sailboat racing. It totally absorbs me in its vast complexity. The sailor needs to understand his boat and its sails and rigging. There are at least ten adjustments that can be made to the Mercury to obtain the optimum trim. The crew constantly makes these adjustments depending upon changes in the direction and strength of the wind and even the sea state. The skipper needs to know the tides, currents, and wind patterns and expected shifts, often called local knowledge. The racing rules are extensive and complicated. They are used to improve the boats position. For example, the leeward boat has luffing rights. That means that when two boats are alongside each other the boat away from the wind direction can luff the other boat by sailing closer to the direction of the wind. The leeward skipper calls “pull her up” or the equivalent, and the windward skipper must trim his sails to sail “higher” or tack away from what is the best course. Thus the leeward boat has moved ahead. There are many other ways to use the rules to improve the boat’s position in the race, and even force competitors into fouls resulting in disqualifications. This frequently leads to protests and subsequent trial like hearings by the race committee where the racing rules are used to attempt to disqualify a competitor. There is one Americas Cup sailor who is famous for his tactics designed to cause competitors to foul. Ham frequently used strategy to improve his position in a race. In the first race of the championship regatta mentioned above, the fleet followed the leader like a flock of sheep. The leader later said he took a looping route to defend against a wind shift that would have required him to tack. Ham and I discussed this and decided that the summer winds on San Francisco Bay never shift to the east, so we took the straight or “rumb” line so that we were several hundred yards from the rest of the fleet. Thus we moved from mid pack to third for that race. This was our best finish ever, and at the beginning of the championship. On the way home that evening we stopped at a donut shop on 19th street to celebrate our success. Decades later I feel a special thrill when I pass that place remembering a special day with my sailing buddy.

I believe that this bit of our sailing life clearly shows the nature of Ham Clark. He had always been his own man. He would study until he understood a problem, and then approach it in his own way. From what he told me through the years, he was always that way. He got into amateur radio as a child and joined the Oregon National Guard as a radio expert before the beginning of WWII. He ended up in the European theater, primarily in communications. I believe he made it to master sergeant before getting back to private when he made some unsolicited suggestion to the commanding officer. I guess that in typical Ham fashion he called them as he saw them.

This drive for the unconventional continued after the war. He started an electrical engineering course on the GI bill. At some point he chose to move to what would eventually be called the ergonomic area. He switched to art school so that he could become involved in the design of electronic systems that fit the human user. I don’t know what this unconventional education did for his career as a Sylvania engineer, but it certainly was typical Ham Clark to design his own unique education. While he was in college he met and married the fabulous Phyllis. Now his unconventional boat had a firm anchor. This turned out to be a great combination. This is an aspect of Hamilton that I have never understood. In his personal and family life he was very conventional. Their children, Linda and George, did all the usual things growing up in Saratoga while in his play Ham was unconventional. His work took him on extended overseas assignments at least four times. When the children were small the family spent a few years in Italy and England. After Linda and George started college, Phyllis and Ham were in Germany and Guam. There was also a short trip to Japan. I don’t know much about his work life as much of it was military and classified. I know that he worked on some aspect of radio receivers. When they left for Germany, Ham sold his Mercury. Eventually, I bought and raced my own Mercury with George sometimes crewing for me. On their return Ham crewed for me also. I did better when he was along than I ever had before. While Ham and Phyllis were gone we kept in contact by mail. George and Linda spent holidays with my family while their parents were gone. So in addition to helping me learn to sail Ham loaned me his children so that I could have young people around after my sons left home. I also had the experience of having an almost daughter around. A few years after Phyllis and Ham returned I retired and Sandy and I took off on our own sailing adventure. We stayed in touch by mail, and eventually Ham and Phyllis spent a week with us on our boat in Zihuatanejo Mexico. Being on a 32 foot sailboat with a tiny shower and not very comfortable berth was probably very difficult for Phyllis, but it was a great gift to Ham and me to be able to sail together again.

After Sandy and I settled in Florida we traveled to California to visit with friends and family. So I was able to visit with him every year or so for the past eight years. In recent years his health failed and finally on December 7, 2005 he died. He will be missed by many, but in a special way by me his sailing buddy. The world and I are infinitely poorer without Hamilton Clark, a unique and honorable man. I now have another big hole in my life. I don’t know what kind of band they have in Heaven, but I am sure that Ham has found his own drummer to march to.