Clark College marks 75th birthday

Students and faculty gathered at Clark College to sing Happy Birthday in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the community college. (The Columbian/Steven Lane)

Clark College students, faculty members and employees kicked off a new school day Wednesday morning with a song.

Not just any tune: A spirited version of “Happy Birthday,” to celebrate Clark’s 75th anniversary, dating to the school’s first day of class in October 1933.

“That’s it. Get back to work!” exhorted Bob Knight, Clark president, as a couple hundred well-wishers scattered from the chime tower, the centerpiece of the Vancouver main campus.

The tower was set to repeat the birthday music during a full day of festivities.

Taking in the fog-cloaked gathering from a nearby resting spot were a few young Clark students.

“Seventy-five years, that’s a long time,” said Sean Emery, 19, of Vancouver. “That means this place was founded back in the ’20s or ’30s sometime. Jesu-loo, that’s a long time!”

“I can’t relate, really,” said another student barely one-fourth of Clark’s age. But the young man did picture a rosy future for the college: “Probably another 75 years of job security for some teachers,” he quipped, wishing to remain nameless.

His classmate, Elizabeth Clampett, 19, of Portland, had quite the contemporary reason to hang out.

“I’m so early, to get a parking spot,” she explained.

Campus parking was never an issue for Clark’s oldest living, local student, Bill Farr, 96 years young and a Hazel Dell resident. He only had an eight-block walk in the 1930s.

At a special breakfast held Wednesday in the historic Hidden House — that’s where Clark’s founding dean, Robert Oliver, and five other adults elected to launch classes the following day, Oct. 2, 1933, thanks largely to one student’s advance payment of a full year’s tuition — Farr treated Knight and a few other Clark insiders to vivid memories of his college days and life in vintage Vancouver.

“I came for fun,” said Farr, who arrived at Clark Junior College in 1937, at age 25, to join two dozen other students.

“It was a nice, friendly little college. Everyone knew each other,” Farr said. He wasn’t the most ambitious student, he concedes, but still found a sense of purpose as America clawed out of the Great Depression.

“The best thing, I thought, was, ‘I’m learning something, and I’m going to amount to more than just a hard worker, just a laborer. That eventually, this is going to amount to something.’

“What, I didn’t know for sure,” said Farr, who then spent 25 years as a firefighter.

Fast forward to 2008 years: Students pour into Clark College by the thousands — more than 12,500 students are enrolled this quarter — most with better-shaped plans, but identical goals of self-improvement.

“Amazing. It’s almost an impossibility to think it could grow that much in this short a time, and to have so many students,” said Farr, who remembers the current campus site as a thick forest of fir trees. “Where they come from, I have no idea.”

Later on Wednesday, Clark leaders dished out birthday cake to students, staff members and visitors.

They also gathered to dedicate a new meeting room in the remodeled Gaiser Hall as the Ellis F. Dunn Community Room, to honor longtime Clark administrator and one-time interim president Ellis Dunn.

As dusk fell, action returned to the chime tower. Congratulatory messages and speeches accompanied the introduction of newly enhanced nighttime lighting of the tower.