Richard Leslie Clarke ’42

Richard Leslie Clarke ’42 died August 5, 2017, with his wife and eldest daughter at his side, at Presbyterian Home’s Westminster Place in Evanston, Illinois, after a sustained progression of dementia. Dick was a native of Lakewood, Ohio, and, later, Media, Pennsylvania, before coming to Dartmouth, where he succeeded three relatives. Some of his fondest memories and greatest friends came from his time at Dartmouth, where he studied economics, spent his senior year at Tuck and indulged passions for Big Band music and camaraderie as a member of Phi Delta Theta. Upon graduation he joined the ranks of naval officers from the “Ninety Day Wonder” program and was deployed to the North Atlantic as a gunnery officer on the destroyer MacLeish by October 1942. His tour of duty in the Navy brought him to many Eastern seaboard ports of call and, fatefully, on leave in October 1943, he was introduced to his future wife, Jane Harshaw, in New York City. Jane and Dick were engaged Christmas of 1943, married in February 1944 and, following his service in WW II, moved to Winnetka, Illinois. Dick worked as a marketing executive for Container Corp. and the Packaging Corp. of America before starting his own advertising and printing business in 1973. He and Jane raised their children in a home they built in Northfield, Illinois. Dick is survived by Jane; daughter Patricia and her husband, James; daughter Judith and her husband, Dirk; son Richard ’74 and his wife, Leslie; seven grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.