An analysis for the descendants of Richard and DeVonne Clarke
Commentary for the descendants of Richard and DeVonne Clarke. These are not Richard's words; his chapters appear elsewhere on this site exactly as he wrote them.
Richard typed his memoirs in the late 1980s on a Corona personal computer his son Dicky helped him buy in May 1986, using WordPerfect. He finished the bulk of the work in late 1989, writing the final pages of his fifty-year chronicle on 27 November 1989 and his genealogy chapter on 20 June 1989, the very day his sixth great-grandchild was born. The chapters on this site were recovered from his original WordPerfect files decades later and converted to readable text.
A word about method, because it matters for anyone who studies these pages in the future. Richard's text is presented verbatim. His spellings, his double spaces after sentences, his occasional slips of the typewriter hand, all of it stands as he left it. Where the file conversion itself introduced damage, such as an ampersand corrupting into the numeral 7, or underlining that vanished, those spots are documented in the source code of each page rather than silently repaired. The goal was to give his descendants the document he actually wrote, not a tidied version of it. He told us why himself, at the end of Chapter 28: this record exists to answer the question “Where were you on the night of . . .?” An answer is only worth having if no one has rewritten it.
The recovery has since gone deeper than the plain text. A WordPerfect file stores its formatting as embedded codes, and decoding those codes brought back things the typed transcripts had lost. Richard's underlining was one of them: the codes that carried it were identified and read, which finally solved a small mystery in Chapter 27, where he had written “(My underlining.)” beside a passage whose emphasis had otherwise disappeared. The same work turned up something every family historian should weigh. The transcripts that had circulated for years sometimes quietly corrected him, smoothing a spelling here or a slip there; in one chapter alone, roughly fifteen readings were restored from the original file to what he had actually typed. In other chapters the transcript and the original matched perfectly. The rule adopted here follows from that comparison: where a transcript and the original file disagree, the original file wins.
Two provenance notes belong on the record. The Work chapter, Chapter 7, survives only in a damaged file. Its text ends in the middle of a sentence, at the words “My health insurance had been with Kaiser since about 1957 and I tho”, where later binary data overwrote the end of the document. The family is seeking a clean copy, and there is reason to hope one exists: the printer codes embedded in the files show that the chapters were saved across different sessions on different equipment, so a separate backup of Chapter 7 may well survive somewhere. Chapter 1 is the one current exception to the verbatim rule on this site. The version published now is from an earlier web adaptation rather than the original file, which has not yet surfaced; when Richard's own Chapter 1 file is found, that page will be rebuilt to match the rest.
One last note for anyone counting chapters. Richard renumbered the work after he wrote it. Chapter 28 refers back to “my previous chapter (7) of our courtship and marriage,” but in the final arrangement that material is Chapter 6. No chapter is missing; he simply reordered once the whole shape was in front of him, the way a writer does.
Richard organized his memoir the way an engineer would. There are chronological chapters covering courtship, the war, and the long married years; travel chapters for the trips that deserved their own files; a health chapter; and then a remarkable series of portrait chapters, one for each person who shaped his life: his mother Ada, his father Lionel, his siblings Bob, Arthur, and Betty, his wife DeVonne, his children Dicky, Reggie, and Kandy, his cousin Barbara, and his friend Glenn. He cross-references his own chapters constantly (“See Chapter 14,” “See Chapter 22”), which is how the numbering of chapters whose headings were damaged in recovery was confirmed; his own internal map told us where each one belonged. That map is now nearly fully drawn. The work recovered and published here runs from the Foreword through Chapter 40, Conclusions, the whole arc he intended. The original Chapter 41 was only an index and has been retired from the site. Two files remain imperfect rather than missing: Chapter 7 survives in a damaged copy, and Chapter 1 still awaits its original file, as noted above.
Chapter 4 contains the hinge of Richard's whole life, and he never once calls attention to it. He flunked out of Stanford, falling past the line by a single point in the demerit system he describes with an engineer's precision, and came home to Colton in disgrace. Because he was home, and only because he was home, an invitation reached him to an April Fool's dance, and there he had what he calls his first encounter with the Church. The young woman who drew him to it enters the page almost as an afterthought, her name set down as a paragraph's quiet punchline: her name was DeVonne. His worst failure delivered both his wife and his faith. Richard lets the two facts sit side by side and trusts the reader to feel the providence between them. It is the whole memoir in miniature: the most important things arrive disguised as ordinary ones, and he refuses to underline them.
Read it carefully and Chapter 6 rearranges the calendar of the entire marriage. Richard and DeVonne were first married not in a temple and not in a church but in a civil ceremony in Tijuana on 28 May 1938, a decision made almost on impulse while walking past the marriage-shop signs after a cousin's wedding in San Diego. They kept it secret through the summer. By September DeVonne was expecting. What followed is pure 1938: a midnight elopement arranged through letters hidden in a coffee can and a cereal box, a younger brother sworn to secrecy, a Model A bought with three hundred dollars of summer wages. This is the fact that quietly governs the rest of the book. It is why the anniversary arithmetic in Chapters 28 and 29 counts from 1938, why the Golden Anniversary falls when it does, and why the later temple sealing at St. George carries the weight it does: it was the sacred completion of a union that had begun in a hurry, in another country, half a century before.
Read Chapter 28's opening and closing together and you have the whole arc of Richard and DeVonne's life. In 1941 they are a young couple playing low-stakes poker with the neighbors until late on Saturday nights, still in bed on the morning of Pearl Harbor, not active in the Church, with a Home Teacher who visits on the one night Richard is conveniently out. By the final page, written in November 1989, Richard is a former Bishop and Stake Presidency counselor serving a mission with DeVonne at the Ventura Mission Office, 44 temple sessions away from a lifetime goal of one thousand. He never preaches about this transformation or even points at it. He simply records both ends and lets fifty years sit between them. That restraint is itself a portrait of the man: he trusted the record.
DeVonne emerges from these pages indirectly, and all the more vividly for it. She cut Richard's hair for over forty years after deciding she could do no worse than a barber who had butchered it. She beat him at tennis until she tired. She collected dolls and miniatures; he built her a doll house shingle by shingle and called the tedium worth it because “DeVonne loves it, which is what really counts.” Her mother died in their home in December 1982 with DeVonne caring for her. The grandfather clock they bought in 1986 was, in Richard's words, really a grandmother's clock, “because we bought it for DeVonne.” Anyone who wants to know what their marriage was made of should notice how often his sentences end with her.
The portrait chapters give Richard's father, Lionel, more dimensions than any other figure in the book, and they build slowly across several chapters before the formal portrait in Chapter 18. He rented the same house for twenty years rather than buy, on the reasoning that the Cement Plant would cut a man's pay if it learned he could afford a mortgage, a small piece of Depression-era labor history that also explains the guarded, careful man of the later chapter. He kept a Colt revolver under his pillow after a run of robberies on East I Street, and once drew it, in the dark, on his own returning son. He answered Richard's teenage smoking with a razor strop and the words “Don't you smoke again,” and a single kitchen slap cured a boy of stealing for the rest of his life. He drowned a litter of unwanted puppies and told it years later without flinching. Read in sequence, these are not the anecdotes of a hard man so much as the slow assembling of a real one, and the arc pays off in the telegram below.
Western Union runs through this family like a nervous system, and three telegrams tell Lionel's whole heart. The first, from a stranded young Richard to his father, is all of nine words: a plea from Santa Maria to wire ten dollars. The second came after the secret elopement, when the razor-strop father who might have raged instead wired his son at Stanford: “Keep on at Stanford, Love to you both,” a blessing and a tuition promise folded into a single line. The third arrived in 1945 at a base in Dover, announcing by wire from DeVonne's father that Kandy had been born. For a family that lived its largest moments at a distance, the telegram was the form love took when it had to travel.
Chapter 27 may be the most quietly profound thing Richard wrote. Glenn Rogers was not family, not a member of the Church, and a Mason whose stated creed was “the simple belief in God as practiced in Masonry.” Yet Richard gave him a full portrait chapter alongside his parents and children, and the chapter earns it. Glenn secretly brokered the dismissal of a slander lawsuit against Richard over a subcontractor lunch while the University's own attorneys wrote letters taking the credit. Glenn fought on paper, repeatedly and at cost to his own standing, for a promotion Richard never received. When Glenn was dying of cancer in 1978 with a wife too ill to care for him, Richard did his banking, his groceries, and his laundry, and drove him to chemotherapy. In Glenn's papers after his death they found a letter to his wife naming “Bishop Dick Clarke” as one of two “Real Men” she could call on.
The chapter ends nine years after Glenn's death, in December 1987, with Richard and DeVonne performing the temple sealing of Glenn and Rae. Whatever a reader's own faith, the meaning of that act within Richard's is unmistakable: it was the most permanent gift he believed he could give, offered to a friend who had told him in writing that he belonged to no church. The exchange of retirement letters in the middle of the chapter, Richard's tribute slipped into Glenn's coat pocket and Glenn's reply about Rae picking winning horses with her eyes shut, is the finest correspondence in the entire memoir.
Chapter 31 preserves, in full, the Patriarchal Blessing Richard received on 11 November 1948, and the date repays attention. By his own account in Chapter 30, 1948 is also the year he began his genealogical research, and within four months he would start the UCLA job he chose deliberately because forty hours a week left room for family and Church. The blessing told a thirty-one-year-old engineer that integrity was “a heritage which has come to you thru your fathers” from “a long line of faithful men and women.” He then spent the next forty years trying to document that very line, hardest of all on his father's side. It also promised that his “posterity shall be preserved,” a phrase that lands rather literally on a website built by that posterity to preserve him in return. Richard chose to record the blessing “in total” in a memoir written for his descendants; that choice, like everything else here, has been honored exactly.
Chapter 5, on swimming, is where Richard's character shows up in athletic form. After a disputed open-water race at Oceanside, his rival Herb Barthels offered to swim it again to settle the question. Richard, flat on his back in the sand, declined with a sentence that is equal parts grace and honesty: he told Barthels he had swum farther and earned the win, and then admitted he would not have swum it over for anything. He records, with the same candor, that he was the dirtiest player in Pacific Coast Conference water polo, taught every trick by his own coach, and that he swam the 50-yard freestyle in 23.8 from a flat start with no blocks, in an era when training with weights was thought to ruin a swimmer. Sportsmanship and self-knowledge, set down without varnish: he wanted to win, he played hard to the edge of fair, and he could laugh at himself for both.
Chapter 7 is the record of a working life seen from inside the profession that built postwar Los Angeles. Richard distinguishes carefully between titles that civilians blur together, Principal against Senior engineer at Irvine, Principal Development Engineer at the Hospital, and the underlining recovered from the file lands exactly on those distinctions, because to him they were not vanity but the measure of the work. The chapter holds the small triumphs an engineer remembers: the conversion of the campus from fifty-cycle to sixty-cycle power, and the household vacuum cleaner that finally ran right afterward, vindicating his mother's old complaint; an Outstanding Performance award of $707.82; a colleague, the kitchen manager Paul Hansen, born on 30 September 1917, the very same day as Richard. And it holds the tribute he clearly treasured, a farewell letter from his supervisor Lamson, to the effect that every organization needs at least one Richard C. Clarke type, and this one had been fortunate enough to have the original. The chapter then breaks off mid-sentence where the file was damaged, which gives the working life an unintended and rather moving open end.
Chapter 26 contains a discovery that Richard himself may not have fully appreciated. His beloved cousin Barbara Smith married a photographer Richard records as “Pedro G. Guerrero.” Research during the recovery of these files confirmed that this was Pedro E. Guerrero (1917 to 2012), who spent more than two decades as Frank Lloyd Wright's personal photographer and later became the trusted photographer of the sculptors Alexander Calder and Louise Nevelson. He was the subject of a PBS American Masters documentary, and his published obituaries confirm his first wife was Barbara Smith, who died in 1976, with the same children Richard names. The family's “favorite cousin” was married to one of the significant American photographers of the twentieth century, and the letters Barbara wrote to Richard in 1975, preserved in full in his chapter, are now small primary sources touching that world.
A similar footnote hides in Chapter 24. The BYU Forum speaker Richard's son heard in 1967, recorded as “Dr. Charles Malit,” was almost certainly Charles Malik, the Lebanese statesman who helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and served as President of the UN General Assembly. Richard's family history brushes against world history more than once, usually in a subordinate clause.
These chapters are a genealogical source of the first order, and they should be used the way Richard himself used Aunt Polly's book: trusted in substance, verified in detail. He enumerates all twenty-one grandchildren and the first six great-grandchildren with dates, hospitals, and cities. He preserves the full text of letters, a patriarchal blessing, newspaper clippings, and a 1945 birth telegram. He documents his mother's Daughters of the American Revolution membership (1929) and the privately printed 1926 book “The Gallogly Family, The West Family,” which he had independently verified against English parish records by a professional genealogist. He states plainly that the hard problem is his father's line, and Chapter 18 contains his evidence pointing toward the Wall family of Kings Heath, Birmingham.
Several small discrepancies between chapters are preserved rather than resolved, and future researchers should know about them. Granddaughter Natasha's birth date is given as 12 November 1971 in Chapter 24 but 2 November 1971 in Chapter 28. Her mother Liz's family name is spelled Piranian in Chapter 24 and Paranian in Chapter 28. Richard was working partly from memory, as he admits at the start of Chapter 28, and these are exactly the sorts of variances a careful genealogist expects. Original records, not the memoir, should settle them.
A few more surface in the early chapters and are worth flagging in the same spirit. DeVonne's maiden name appears as Mayes in Chapter 4 and as May in Chapter 22, where her father is named Ephraim May; which spelling the family used socially is worth checking against records. Richard's sister appears as both Bette and Betty within Chapter 9, though Betty is the form he uses consistently elsewhere. And the “1955 Impala” he remembers buying as a first new car was almost certainly a 1955 Bel Air, since Chevrolet did not introduce the Impala name until 1958; the family did later own a 1960 Impala, which is the likeliest source of the slip. The text is left untouched in every case; these are notes for researchers, not corrections to Richard.
One spelling deserves special protection: Kandy's given name, Kathrine, with no second e. Richard explains in Chapter 25 that this was intentional. Any future editor who “corrects” it will be introducing an error.
Richard recorded his health with the same precision he recorded house prices, and his descendants may one day be glad of it. He suffered a pulmonary embolism in November 1980 and a second in January 1982, both requiring hospitalization. Blood clots that recur are the kind of history physicians ask about generations later. He also describes, with good humor, a lifelong pattern of blood pressure readings that spiked the moment a cuff touched his arm, dating from his 1942 Army Air Corps physical, a textbook account of what is now called white coat hypertension. A hernia repair in 1986 and progressive hearing loss in the right ear round out the record. His full health chapter is Chapter 16. None of this is medical advice; it is simply information a family should not lose.
A few details from other chapters belong with it. The 1980 embolism he recognized while swimming, when he ran out of breath after only a short distance, and he recovered afterward in a hospital room that had once been reserved for Muhammad Ali. His lifelong trouble with his left knee traces to an obstacle course at Yale in 1943, diagnosed at the time as an internal derangement of the joint. And DeVonne's own history belongs here too: in 1937 the trailer she was riding in went over a cliff outside Redding, a drop of roughly seventy-five feet, leaving her hospitalized for ten days with an internal leg wound and permanent scar tissue.
Because Richard wrote down what things cost, his memoir doubles as a half-century price index of American middle-class life. The Panorama City house in 1949: $10,950, at $68.50 a month. His starting UCLA salary the same year: $400 a month, chosen deliberately over better-paying jobs because forty hours a week left room for family and Church. Wisdom teeth, all four, in 1942: $20. The Westlake Village house in 1976: $65,500. A first microwave in 1980, a first VCR in 1984 at $499.95, a personal computer in 1986 at $2,460. And one episode that deserves remembering on its own: when his 1986 Pontiac Firebird proved a lemon, the retired engineer methodically escalated through the dealer, the manufacturer, and the Better Business Bureau to arbitration, won, and recovered $13,049.81, every dollar he had paid. He was seventy years old and entirely unintimidated.
Several passages are primary sources in the strict sense. He heard Pearl Harbor announced on the radio. He watched the 1961 Bel-Air fire consume million-dollar homes from the roof of the ten-story UCLA Medical Center, describing houses that “literally explode.” He watched the Apollo 11 landing live and wrote that he felt he was standing beside Armstrong. And he wrote his account of the Loma Prieta earthquake just two days after it struck, while rescuers were still working the collapsed Nimitz Freeway and the World Series sat suspended; his report has the unsettled present tense of news still happening. A historian could quote any of these passages with confidence about exactly when they were written.
His youth and his war years brushed against history just as often, usually in a clause he does not stop to admire. During his Army Air Forces training in New Haven, Glenn Miller's band played Retreat twice a day, marching the St. Louis Blues March down the street; Richard noted the 1989 television memorial to Miller even as he wrote. At Cal Tech his unit worked sighting tables alongside Carl D. Anderson, who had won the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the positron. A captain he trained under at La Junta had been an alternate for the Tokyo raid Richard remembered as the Billy Mitchell mission, the one history calls the Doolittle Raid. Further back, he and his father stayed up an entire night at a neighbor's shortwave set listening to Edward VIII abdicate, and Lindbergh's 1927 flight reached Colton as a song a local woman wrote. The sprinter Foy Draper, who turns up in his swimming chapter, had run the third leg of the 4x100 relay that won gold with Jesse Owens at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and died as an Army Air Forces pilot over Tunisia in 1943. Richard kept company with the century he lived through, and mostly let it pass without comment.
Richard's wit is dry enough that a fast reader can pass right over it. The turtle named Myrtle who was jealous of Heckel the crow. The crow itself, wing clipped, invited indoors to watch television the year it snowed in Panorama City. His car maintenance philosophy: when the car made funny noises, “I just turned up the radio and thought nothing of it.” The doctor at his B-29 physical reading his blood pressure and saying, “You didn't want to go overseas anyway, did you?” The 1966 entry in his chronicle, complete: “This must have been a good year. I can't find any notes to remind me of what went on for us in 1966.” His descendants inherited more than his records; anyone in the family who deadpans inherited this too.
The early chapters are just as seeded with it. A boyhood doctor whose chief distinguishing feature is that he “has lost his suspenders.” The 595 rope-jumps he did to match his family's house number, of which he notes that he “set a record and never tried to break it.” The wartime officer, Major Black, who punished him by ruling that he “could not drink for 30 days,” followed by Richard's flat observation that the Major “knew I didn't drink.” The Cal Tech telephone operators, of whom he reports that “none of them were under 60 years of age.” And the shrug that closes Chapter 9, after pages of carefully dated travel: he is “not even certain which of the kids we had with us on all the trips.” The jokes are never announced. You have to be reading at his speed to catch them.
Richard wrote honestly, including about hard things: a son's departure from the faith, a friend's wife's alcoholism, a colleague's suicide, his own blunt 1989-era descriptions of a changing old neighborhood. The decision made in this recovery was to preserve every word, because a sanitized ancestor is a stranger. These passages are presented as originally written, as documents of one man's perspective in his own time, and readers two and three generations on should receive them that way: not as the family's final word on anyone or anything, but as the unedited voice of a grandfather who chose honesty over polish, even when writing about his own disappointments. That choice is precisely what makes the rest of the memoir trustworthy.
The same principle covers the harder reading in the war and boyhood chapters. He recounts the drowning of a fellow cadet during a training river crossing at Boca Raton plainly, including the botched head counts that delayed the discovery, refusing the comfort of euphemism. And the early chapters carry the language and the divisions of their time and place, including the way Richard's boyhood town sorted people by group. Those passages are kept exactly as written. It is worth noticing that the same chapters which record period prejudice also record, with no special pleading, the Mexican coworker at the ice house who crossed the room to help a struggling young Richard make his quota. He set both kinds of memory down side by side and added no verdict. Preserving both, rather than choosing the flattering one, is what keeps the record honest.
There is a symmetry on this website that Richard could not have planned. He served the Army Air Forces as an engineer: he worked on B-25 and B-17 modifications, including a vertical rocket launcher, on the nose cone of the A-26, and on early P-80 jet testing at Muroc Field, the desert base that is now Edwards Air Force Base. On the other side of his grandson's family, Roger H. Zierenberg Sr. flew sixty combat missions over Europe in a P-51 Mustang and came home with the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Silver Star. The same Army Air Forces, the same war: one man at the flight-test field in the California desert, the other in the air over Germany. They never met. Their family lines met only later, in the grandson who now keeps both their records on one site, a few clicks apart. It is fitting that the engineer's pages and the pilot's tribute sit together here, two halves of one inheritance.
Richard closed his genealogy chapter in June 1989 with this:
“What I have researched and collected is on my home computer. My son, Dick, has a copy of most of it on his. I hope that nothing will be lost in years to come but it will be extended as my children and their children continue the research, and do the temple work that is required.”
He wrote that about files on a 1986 Corona PC, in a word processor that would be obsolete within a decade. Thirty-seven years later, a grandson opened those files, decoded them, and published them where every descendant can read them. The hope he typed into that machine is the reason this page exists. And his last recorded wish, written a month later at the end of Chapter 28, was to live into the next century and meet at least one great-great-grandchild. Whether and how that wish was answered belongs to the family's living memory, and is worth recording on this site beside his words.
Prepared during the recovery and publication of the original WordPerfect files, 2026.