PIECES OF THE PAST
Celebrating The Legacy of Charley’s Boys
by John S. Lang
 If
the Shoremen have another run at the Division III title in men’s
lacrosse this spring, as the experts expect, some thanks are
due to an old-time athlete today’s young players may not
have met, but honor just the same. It was Charley Clark ’34
who started that tradition of excellence they are upholding.
The death of Charley Clark, at age 90, two weeks before Christmas,
in a hospice center in Towson, MD, was a loss for all of collegiate
lacrosse, but for this campus—his alma mater—in
particular. While his own memory of old friends and glories
past had faded with the advance of Alzheimer’s disease,
the Washington College community will not forget how much is
owed to one good man. Clark was, arguably, the father of lacrosse
at Washington College. What cannot be argued at all is that
Clark fathered a Shoreman tradition of winning that has endured
more than half a century.
Today lacrosse is as much a part of the Washington College image
as basketball at Indiana or football at Notre Dame. Yes, of
course, the comparisons are a stretch of expectations. This
is a Division III school that can give no athletic scholarships,
and sure, there are bigger lacrosse powers in Division I. Yet
consider the case from the level playing field of its own division:
Washington College was the national champion of 1998 and has
played in more championship games—eight—and has
more players—six—in the National Lacrosse Hall of
Fame than any of its regular competitors.
The Shoremen have reached the playoffs 25 times over the past
30 years, winning more tournament games than any other institution.
At the start of this season, with four returning All-American
players, they were ranked No. 3 by the Centennial Conference
coaches’ poll and No. 4 by Lacrosse Magazine. All this
is despite playing one of the toughest schedules of any D-III
college in the nation. “We could get better records with
a weaker schedule,” says Athletic Director Bryan Matthews,
“but that is not in the Washington College tradition.”
This is the tradition that begins with Charles Branch Clark,
Sr.
Charley earned letters in lacrosse and football for Washington
College in the early 1930s, somehow also making  time
in his senior year to be Elm editor, Pegasus sports editor and
fraternity president. A year after he was graduated cum laude,
the college dropped lacrosse. There would be no games for 12
years. It was the Great Depression and Washington, with only
some 290 students then, couldn’t afford the cost. Anyway,
over the six seasons that it fielded teams, Washington owned
the inglorious record of six wins against 32 losses.
In 1946, after earning his master’s degree at Duke and
his doctorate at University of North Carolina, and serving as
a Marine intelligence officer during World War II, Charley was
back on campus as Dr. Clark, chairman of the department of history
and political science. It was in 1948 that a group of students
came to him and pleaded for his help in bringing back lacrosse.
Would they have asked him to be their coach—if they had
known how he’d make them pay in sweat and pain? Clark,
a Howard County farm boy, the seventh of eleven children, an
ex-marine with four battle stars and shrapnel scars across his
stomach, had one clear formula for success: work for it. “He
ran the lacrosse team like it was Parris Island,” says
William A. Barnett ’55, one of his key players in the
1950s and now an optometrist in Annapolis. “I mean, he
ran us to death.”
The story was told and re-told by Charley’s Boys of the
day a Marine recruiter came to Washington College at the start
of the Korean War, watched one of their grueling lacrosse practices,
marched across the field, saluted, and said, “Colonel
Clark, I’ll take every damn one of your men.”
At first lacrosse was a campus club activity, and it was several
years before the college sanctioned it as one of its official
sports. As Clark later recalled in a letter to friends, “I
was coach, trainer, ankle wrapper and all the rest, aided only
by an excellent student manager and Chestertown High School,
which allowed us to use its field.” He scheduled games
wherever he could, with other clubs in the region, and with
the major lacrosse powers like Navy and Johns Hopkins. More
often than not, Clark’s teams won.
“In Clark’s
era this was a very small school (by then some 470 students)
and always very much the underdog,” recalls Hurtt Deringer
’59, retired editor of the Kent County News and onetime
sports information director at Washington College. “Other
schools were saying, ‘Look at that little school on the
Eastern Shore, they can’t beat us.’ And we did.
We were knocking off colleges that had more male faculty than
we had male students.”
“Yeah, we played with the big boys,” recalls John
Parker, the goalie whose amazing 47 saves against Navy in 1955
is one of the Clark-era records that stands yet. “We did
it on a shoestring, too.”
Parker remembers Clark saying that the entire time he coached,
from 1947 to 1956, he had never received a budget from the College
of more than $500. On road trips each player was given $3.50
a day to cover breakfast, lunch and dinner. The coach picked
up much of the team’s expenses from his own pocket, while
players raised money by organizing raffles and dances and doing
odd jobs around Chestertown.
“Those days if you weren’t
first team,” says Parker, “there was no guarantee
your sweat socks would match.”
In mismatched socks or not, every player was expected by Clark
to be fit enough to run circles around opponents, ready to be
60-minute men in a 60-minute game. With little team depth, many
did take the field for the full hour.
“Washington College played a go-for-the-goal brand of
fast-break lacrosse that was beautiful to watch,” recalls
Deringer. “There have been lots of changes in the game
over the years that tended to slow it, like letting midfielders
play with longer sticks. But then, our fast breaks were just
devastating. Washington College teams could score four, five
goals in a row, pop, pop, pop. And the fans loved it.”
Clark’s finest team was probably that of 1954, co-champions
with Syracuse in the Laurie Cox Division and ranked No. 5 among
all colleges in the nation.
Four of Clark’s players are in the National Lacrosse Hall
of Fame: Joseph Seivold ’58, John “Hezzie”
Howard ’56, L. Ray Wood ’51 and Agostino “Mickey”
Dimaggio who played with the 1954 champions but with time out
for Korean War Service didn’t graduate until 1960. Clark
himself was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1988.
The month before Clark’s death from complications due
to Alzheimer’s, in a ceremony he couldn’t know about,
Washington College got its sixth Hall of Famer with the induction
of John Cheek, Class of 1977. Cheek is the College’s all-time
goal scorer with 212. In his entire collegiate career, Cheek
was shut out in only one game—and then only because he
was used as a decoy so others could score.
Cheek is likely to be the last Shoreman to achieve National
Hall of Fame status, and for that matter probably the last player
from any Division III college. As Athletic Director Bryan Matthews
explains it, “The separation between Division I and Division
III schools is much greater than it was 30 years ago. They can
give full scholarships and we can’t, so it’s rare
for scholarship-eligible athletes to attend D-III schools anymore.”
Matthews notes that because of its lacrosse traditions Washington
still does attract some highly talented players who can play
at the national level—“but logic tells you that
their getting into the Hall of Fame is going to be a challenge.”
Another change Matthew cites is that Washington College no longer
faces the big lacrosse powers that teams of Clark and his successors,
including Don Kelly and Matthews himself, regularly played and
often defeated.
“We currently don’t have any Division I schools
on our schedule,” says Matthews, “because they won’t
play us. Until the last ten years we still played Hopkins and
Navy on a regular basis, but they both dropped us. What’s
happened is that over the last couple of decades lacrosse has
risen to a financial stature on major campuses, like big-time
basketball and football in some ways. Now, with power ratings
and different criteria used to make the tournaments, it’s
not worth it to them to take the risk.”
There is little glory today for Hopkins, Brown, Syracuse, Maryland
or North Carolina—teams Washington faced though the 1970s—in
beating a school of non-scholarship athletes, and a loss would
be devastating to their divisional rankings, and a humiliation.
One aspect of Washington’s game that remains unchanged
is its record of winning. A measure of a great coach is the
standard set for successors. Charley Clark, over ten seasons,
had a winning percentage of .681. Don Kelly was .639 over 20
seasons, DiMaggio was .714 in his single season at the helm,
Matthews was .556 in four seasons, Terry Corcoran .689 in twelve,
John Haus .700 over four, and today’s coach, J.B. Clarke,
over the past four years is .708.
Washington College can also thank Charley Clark for having a
firm hand in what would become its greatest regional rivalry,
its annual meeting with Salisbury University.
This is what happened: after leaving Chestertown, Clark taught
at Monmouth College and then became dean and acting president
at Upper Iowa University. He served a term as president of the
U.S. Inter-collegiate Lacrosse Association. He wrote a two-volume
history of the Eastern Shore. For the last 13 years of his life,
he served as an emeritus member of Washington College’s
Board of Visitors and Governors. But also, significantly for
the Shoremen, there were his final teaching years—as chair
of the history department at what was then Salisbury State College.
There, from 1978 through 1982, Clark did just about exactly
what he had done at Washington College 30 years before. He was
asked to resurrect Salisbury’s moribund lacrosse team.
As he recalled in one of his famous single-spaced letters to
friends and former players, “I found among this squad
some good talent, only partly developed. Personnel came principally
from second-line lacrosse public high schools who liked the
game, but for the most part seemed to care little if they won
or lost, or made the sacrifices needed to excel. I introduced
a rigid physical conditioning program. . .”
Indeed. Under Clark, Salisbury immediately became a Division
III threat, reaching the quarterfinals his first season and
the semi-finals in each of his final three, compiling the four-year
record of 44 victories against just 19 defeats.
Clark himself would see no irony in fathering the lacrosse tradition
of Washington and then nurturing the rise of its fiercest modern
rival. To him it was a game of the fastest and the fittest,
and Charley’s Boys, at Washington, and again at Salisbury,
knew that no game and no rival however tough would be any tougher
than his practices. It was maybe inevitable for teams that trace
some of their origins to the same ex-marine taskmaster to end
up meeting in famously bruising contests, which have become
latter-day legend for both schools, rightly known in every year
as The War On The Shore.
Dr. Charles B. Clark made his mark here, even on those latter-day
athletes born too late to make his team. In the crack of sticks
and the thrilling fast break ring the echoes of his example.
John Lang teaches journalism at Washington College.
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