Читать книгу Dutch Clarke - The Early Years - Brian Ratty - Страница 5

Life’s a crap shoot when it comes to family, sometimes you win and sometimes loss. Families can have strange and funny traditions. In my case it was this “mission” stuff. This “back to the earth” notion was just so much bunk to me and from my earliest years, I let everyone know how I felt about it. This wasn’t something that I intended to do or that I would even consider doing in the future.

That wasn’t something Grandfather wanted to hear. For the most part, he wouldn’t even listen to my loud protests. He simply ended our conversations with the same short, stale, stern statement: "You will return a man... a better man."

On the other hand, Uncle Roy would sit and listen to me point out all my reasons for not making such a journey. But in the end he would always tell me, "Look, Dutch, think of it as a colossal adventure. It would make your Grandfather so happy if you did this one little thing for him." A one-year ordeal in a wilderness didn't seem so little to me! But in the end and from his grave, Grandfather would, as always, get his way.

Grandfather loved to tell me about his mission, back when he was young buck. Dutch Eric Clarke was the first-born of a Mormon family near Denver Colorado in 1868. His father, Odo, from the Netherlands, was a dirt farmer. He owned a small farm a few miles outside the city. His mother, Grace, from Scotland, gave birth to seven children over the years. All were boys, but only two would survive. Uncle Roy had been born the last child, when Grandfather was already fourteen years old.

The Clarke family was hard-working, poor, and uneducated. When his father lost the farm in the 1886 drought and had to move into town, Dutch struck out on his own. Some months later, he had saved almost $20 from doing odd jobs around Denver. In those days, $20 was a good grubstake for starting a new life.

While working in town, he learned from some local silver miners about gold being found up in the panhandle of the new state of Idaho. He’d sworn never to be a dirt farmer, and the thought of free gold sounded awful good to young Dutch.

When he arrived north, he found that most of the gold claims had already been taken and that the mines were now being worked. Signing on with one of the local companies, he worked at learning the trade of mining. He would later tell me that working a mine was ten times harder than working any dirt farm.

While laboring in the gold fields, Grandfather befriended an old Indian who lived close to the shack he’d built near the company mine. The Indian told Dutch of a deep valley with a large river running through it, up in the northern mountains, close to the U.S. and Canadian border. He said that few white people had seen this land and that there just might be gold up there.

That's all it took; Dutch started his mission. With only two pack mules full of supplies and tools, he set off to find his fortune. After weeks of searching, he located the valley the old Indian spoke of. Nestled between navy blue and purple mountains, the valley was small, but did have a good-sized river running through it. Here he worked and survived on the banks of the river for a full year. It was hot, it was cold, it rained, and it snowed. He built a small cabin and hunted the forest for the food he ate. He did find gold, but never the mother lode or source of the gold in the river and streams. At year’s end, he packed out over $10,000 of dust and nuggets on the backs of his two mules. This was a great deal of wealth in those days and these riches were to become the seeds of our family’s fortune and future.

Dutch returned to Denver to find that his father had gone under and his mother dying of tuberculosis. Within the month, she, too, passed away, so Grandfather took his younger brother Roy and moved east. They settled in New Jersey, where Dutch worked for many years at a buggy company that was pioneering the manufacture of the new horseless carriages.

Just before the turn of the century, he quit this job to open a new venture, selling petroleum products from what were called “gas stations.” With the growing number of automobiles on the road, he figured gas was a commodity that would be needed for years to come. He called his new venture Gold Gas Stations. Buying gas on the spot market from the few petroleum refiners on the east coast, he then had the fuel trucked to his stations. He was on the ground floor of a whole new industry. Dutch Eric Clarke was in the right place at the right time with the right idea.

Within a few years, Dutch had parlayed two outlets into thirty-five stations. After the turn of the century, Uncle Roy graduated from Harvard Business School (which Grandfather had paid for). Upon graduation, Roy started working for Grandfather. Some years later, they sold their gas stations to the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey for over $250,000 in cash and stock.

Taking some of this money, he and Roy bought one of the petroleum refineries that had once supplied them. Naming this second new venture Gold Coast Petroleum, they built a dynasty. By changing the way the oil was refined, they were soon producing not only gas, but also motor oil, diesel fuel, paint thinner, and kerosene.

Using Uncle Roy's expertise in business and accounting, Dutch acquired a dozen other refineries over the next thirty years. Because the company was without debt, when the Great Depression came in the 1930s and the market for petroleum products started to dry up, he hired guards to oversee and protect closed refineries. He then reopened the plants as the markets improved.

Grandfather was a smug businessman, always working at work. The only thing he had time for was business: it was his life. Grandfather became a very rich man and he measured all other people by the size of their wallets. He was, in fact, quite arrogant, starchy and a skinflint when it came to his money. But of all his accomplishments, it was his "mission," his year in the wilderness, which he liked to talk about the most. Those stories were told and retold, always with reverence. It was he "who went into the mountains a boy and returned a man... a better man.” The stories never seemed to change.

When the time came, my father had his own mission, although I didn't hear the stories from him. Instead, Grandfather loved to tell his tales to me. Dutch Clarke, Jr., was born into this austere and rigid family in 1892. His mother, my Grandmother Alice, was a generous and loving woman who could bring warmth to any home. For some untold reason, he would be her only child.

Grandmother made sure my father had a good education and a large family home in which to grow up, Fairview Manor. Dutch, Sr., built the house, at her insistence, on Long Island in 1901. Junior proved to be a very smart and talented son, and he went to the best schools Alice could find. At nineteen, he graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a degree in Geology. In September of 1911, he started his mission by traveling to the southwest territory of New Mexico, which was not yet a state. Here he would spend a year alone with a horse and two mules, doing a geologic survey of a large desert area.

He and my Grandfather had planned the trip well. Their objective was to find any oil deposits to which they might stake a claim after statehood. With the help of Uncle Roy, who knew one of the local rangers, my father had a base of operations for desert survival training and a point from which to start. Soon after his mission, New Mexico became the 47th state. In 1912, the Clarke’s, Senior and Junior, staked mineral claims on twenty sections of government land. Of these sections, six proved to be "commercial" oil producers, which added to the mounting family fortune. Junior now joined the petroleum business with Uncle Roy and Grandfather.

In 1918, my father married his college sweetheart, Mary Wallace Person, in Oklahoma City. I was born in New Mexico on May 31, 1920, as Eric Dutch Clarke III. Over the years, I came to hate all those names… with the exception, for some reason, of “Dutch.”

My mother and father were killed in an automobile accident in 1925. So it was then, at the age of five, I went to live at Fairview Manor with my grandparents. As I grew older, I deeply resented the fact that I’d lost both of my parents in a split second of squealing brakes and crashing metal. But, to tell the truth, I don't really remember either of them very well.

It was a time when there seemed to be a black cloud of death hanging over the Clarke family. Grandmother Alice died of pneumonia at age fifty-eight, just three years after I came to live with her and Grandfather. I have fond memories of that large, warm, and loving woman. Other than my mother, she was the only person I ever remember kissing or hugging me. In the few years we spent together, she tried her best to help me better understand and know about my parents, their lives and their tragic deaths.

Sad and shaken once again, I consoled myself that my beloved grandmother had joined my parents in heaven. From then on, I could only learn about my father and mother through the stories that Uncle Roy and Grandfather would occasionally tell. Most of all, Senior enjoyed recounting the details of my father's mission in the desert. He would take out old maps and point to the general areas of my father had traveled. Then he would rattle off stories about wild animals, Indians, survival, and finding just the right rock formations. He would always end the tale with his standard statement: "He went into the desert a boy and returned a man... a better man." As the years went by, it became an old sour story, told to deaf ears.