ENGAGING RACONTEUR
Activist, teacher and traveller
Muriel Clarke once chained herself to a tree to stop the city from chopping it down and canoed down the Yukon’s Nahanni River when she was 80.
A physiotherapist for Canadian troops during the Second World War, she protested for environmental causes in her later years and was part of Veterans Against Nuclear Armaments.
Clarke, who died March 16 at age 99, shared a similar willingness to stand up for her beliefs as her father Fighting Joe Clarke, the former Edmonton mayor famed for his fist fight in council chambers when he was an alderman in 1914.
But Clarke, who worked most of her life as a teacher, was also influenced by her upper-crust British mother Gwendolyn, says lifelong neighbour Elizabeth Giroux.
“Muriel had some of those tendencies. I go to the same church as she went and she would be very upset with the children making a racket during the service,” Giroux says. “When we were at school, she was upset at kids wearing jeans. It had to be proper.”
Clarke, who never married, loved to travel — her 1937 University of Toronto physiotherapy yearbook citation says she spent her summer vacations as a camp leader “or seeing America in a Ford V-8. “
She went overseas with the Canadian Army during the Second World War, treating injured soldiers in France and England. After she returned she went back to school.
She attended McGill University and then received a bachelor of education from the University of Alberta in the 1950s, becoming an Edmonton high school teacher.
Giroux, who took Grade 11 English and geography from Clarke at Eastglen High School in the mid1960s, thinks the career change was motivated by a desire for holidays so she’d have more time to travel.
Although Clarke rarely talked about her war experiences, and could be reserved with people she didn’t know, she was also an engaging raconteur, Giroux says.
“Sometimes she would pick a very boring (classroom) topic. One of the boys would ask, ‘What did you see (travelling) in France?’ and she’d be off on one of her stories, forgetting what she was teaching. It would be very interesting.”
Jean Wells, who taught with Clarke at Queen Elizabeth high school in the 1970s, recalls her as a personable but private person.
“She was pretty near always standing at attention. She was proper, very much a professional teacher, friendly … a very honest, direct and dedicated colleague,” she says.
“The last time I saw her, she was 92 and she was really cross they wouldn’t renew her driver’s licence.”
She was unhappy that stories told about her father revolved more around his “fighting” reputation than his accomplishments during a total of nine years on city council between 1912 and 1937, Wells says. One of the highlights of his political career was travelling to Ottawa as mayor in the 1930s and convincing Prime Minister Mackenzie King, a high-school friend, to lease Edmonton the federal land on which Clarke Park and Commonwealth Stadium now stand.
After he died in 1941, his wife Gwendolyn was elected as a city councillor for two years.
Their daughter remained a lifelong Liberal.
She lived almost her entire life in the two-storey Jasper Avenue house Joe built about a century ago in the triangular Cromdale community overlooking the Kinnaird Ravine and the river valley. Books and maps of her trips to such places as India, the Philippines and China lined the walls.
Family friend Yvonne Brown said during Clarke’s memorial service this week that she could name and describe any plant in her extensive garden and sometimes set up a telescope so people could look at the moon.
As a Girl Guide leader, she once produced a live mouse for her troop so she could explain why the little animals were important.
When the city threatened to chop down a row of poplars across the street because they were infested with ants, Giroux says Clarke chained herself to a tree to protect them. They’re still standing.
She was riding her bicycle when she was 85, but her health started to deteriorate a few years later when she was knocked down by a mugger and broke her hip. At age 96, she reluctantly moved out of her home into the Kipnes Centre for Veterans.
Clarke outlived her sister Gwen, and her brother Bennie died in the Second World War.
But she didn’t express regret at not having a family of her own, Giroux says.
“Her kids were the school kids, especially in the geography class.”