Although Clark Booth decided last year to retire from writing a column on sports 50 weeks a year for the archdiocesan weekly the Pilot, the Dorchester Reporter, and a lengthy list of friends to whom he sent the essays via email, he asked Reporter Editor Bill Forry and me for the opportunity “to weigh in later from time to time should events and personalities arouse my tired muse.”
But his muse slumbered on until last Friday when this most gracious man and writer died at age 79, of pulmonary fibrosis, leaving behind his beloved Anne and their family and a large community of friends and admirers.
He also bequeathed us his self-written obituary. It’s a document with few of the rhetorical flourishes that distinguished the writing that he put his mind to over his long years as a journalist. In this instance, he said late last year, “Let’s let the facts tell the story all the way through.”
And so they do.
– TOM MULVOY
‘It was a very good ride’
“Clark Vincent Booth, a journalist who worked all forms of news media for more than a half century during what may now be seen as the Golden Age of the genre, has died at the age of 79. Most of Mr. Booth’s career was played out in Boston where he began in newspapers, moved on to television news, and dallied occasionally in radio, while remaining a free-lance writer for various New England newspapers and periodicals.
“Retiring from full-time work in 2000, Mr. Booth remained active in the free-lance field as a print-columnist and writer/narrator for an international documentary team. It was a matter of some pride to him that he never spent a day of his adult life not tuned in to current events, offering comment on them, or agitating endlessly about them with his loving and ever patient wife of 52 years, Anne. It was a full life, and it went by fast.
“Mr. Booth was born in Boston on March 21, 1939. His parents, Russell and Trudie (Elmore) Booth, were hard-working and intensely driven children of the Depression. Opportunities were limited, which didn’t discourage them from raising a family of five children, endowing each with much to dream of and a willingness to work for it. They were hardscrabble times, yet remarkably inspirational.
“The family bounced from Boston to Arlington to Weymouth to Norwell back to Weymouth where Mr. Booth graduated from high school (1956) then spent a year working at a Randolph sneaker factory earning his college keep and finally arriving at the illustrious College of the Holy Cross where he majored in English, with minors in History and Philosophy, not exactly a formation many might deem practical but ideal for a budding journalist back then.
“Graduating in 1961, he did basic training in the Army for a six-year hitch in the Reserves, then reported to the Quincy Patriot Ledger newspaper in September1962. It was a marvelous time to be entering the business. In the years ahead, major newspapers would attain unprecedented heights of influence and prosperity, while television news -virtually non-existent at the beginning of the Sixties – would be booming by the end of the decade. It was a grand era, destined to be brief but spectacular.
“Mr. Booth was at the Ledger, a superb suburban daily, for three years before being recruited by WBZ-TV News, Boston, where he spent 10 years, before moving over to WCVB-TV, Boston, for 25 years where he became the station’s first ‘Special Correspondent’. In this period, ‘CVB had a global reach, functioning more like a network while being acclaimed by the New York Times as “maybe the finest television station in America.” It was heady stuff: a thrilling place to work at a most
exciting time.
“A sampling of just some of his favorite assignments – both on the news side where he spent most of his years, and in sports, where he digressed for 12 bright and sunny seasons – affirms the point. His areas of specialization, aside from sports, were politics, religion, culture,
international affairs, and he was allowed freely to dabble in all of them.
“Favorites included: Six national political conventions; 10 presidential campaigns; two papal elections; four papal visits to the U.S. and Canada; two Roman Catholic consistories, and a synod; 12 World Series; three Super Bowls; 20 Stanley Cup Playoff festivals; three stints in Northern Ireland covering ‘the Troubles’; the fall of the Iron Curtain (1989-’90); Cuba under Castro; an extended study of the Catholic Church in America, and another of the royal family in England.
“Mr. Booth was also the writer and narrators of dozens of documentaries and news specials on a wide and diverse range with the
favorites, including programs on New England Literary Masters, Remembrances of World War II, featuring the historian William L. Shirer, the lingering grip of America’s Civil War, and the rowdy history of the Boston Garden.
“For nine years, Mr. Booth also moderated a weekly public affairs T.V program, “In Good Faith,” which brought a religious perspective to the weekly glut of current events. In his senior years, he served as chief writer for a Boston College based television documentary team called ‘Etoile” that focused on conflict resolution in international trouble spots and produced programs on South Africa, the Middle East, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, East Africa, the Sicilian Mafia, and the Russian Gulag.
In keeping with a lifelong interest in the games America loves, for decades he wrote a weekly column on sports for The Pilot, the weekly newspaper of the archdiocese of Boston, and for the Dorchester Reporter. For further amusement, he authored a history of the Boston Bruins hockey team, his favorite.
“Mr. Booth’s partner in all this fine madness was the beloved Anne Marion (Cowlin) Booth, RN. They met in 1963, on an enchanted evening, and all the rest was, to him, sweet destiny. They married in 1966, lived in Reading, Massachusetts for 30 years before moving to New Smyrna Beach, Fla., in 1999. Together they saw much of the world, verily at its best and often enough at its brightest. They walked Washington on an historic day, floated down the Seine on a summer night, lumbered the high ground of Thailand on the back of an elephant, walked the Great Wall of China, annually did Tanglewood, reveled in Dvorak in glorious Prague, and never once missed Masterpiece Theatre. Who could ask for anything more?
“In addition to his wife, Mr. Booth leaves sons Scott of New York City and Matthew of Apollo Beach, Fl., daughter Tracy Husbands of New Smyrna Beach and their spouses, Carolyn, Kristen and Guy, and five “almost perfect” grandchildren – Alyssa, Paul, Christopher, Mara, and Lucy – plus Max, the wonder dog. Dear Brother Russ, eternally “the Kid,” passed on too young. But surviving him also are three dear sisters and their spouses, all of Massachusetts: Jacquelyn (& Edward) Splaine, Roberta (& Barry) Fuller, Cheryl (& Terry) Kirkman.
“All things considered, it was a very good ride. Clark wishes one and all – friends and family, classmates and colleagues, neighbors and acquaintances down through all the years – a very fond adieu. And, with apologies to Ed Murrow, adds; ‘To one and all, good night and good luck!’”
