Billy C. Clark
Billy C. Clark wrote memoirs, fiction and poetry about his life and river culture along the Kentucky-West Virginia border, where the Big Sandy flows into the Ohio at Catlettsburg. His mother was determined that he would be born on the Kentucky side of those rivers.
Bertha Clark was in Kenova, West Virginia, on Dec. 19, 1928, shopping for second-hand clothes for her six—soon to be seven—children. When her labor pains began, she gathered her purchases, boarded the streetcar, and urged the driver to get her back across the U.S. 60 bridge to Catlettsburg as fast as he could, according to an essay by Clark’s friend, James M. Gifford, CEO and senior editor of the Jesse Stuart Foundation.
In 1992, the modern replacement for that bridge was named for Billy Curtis Clark, who also is memorialized in a mural on Catlettsburg’s floodwall.
Clark was born into a poor family: His father was a shoemaker and fiddler; his mother took in laundry. He left home at 11 and lived the next five years on the third floor of a city government building in Catlettsburg while working his way through school. “I cleaned the men’s and women’s jails, wound the town clock, and served as a volunteer firefighter,” he recalled. He also fished the rivers with a trotline and trapped mink and muskrat to sell their fur.
After a three-year hitch in the Army, Clark went to the University of Kentucky on the GI Bill in 1952. Three years later, he ran out of money and left without a degree. He went to work writing. In the space of four years, Clark sold five books to New York publishers: Song of the River (1957), The Trail of the Hunter’s Horn (1957), Riverboy (1958), Mooneyed Hound (1959) and A Long Row to Hoe: The Life of a Kentucky Riverboy (1960). Time magazine named his autobiographical A Long Row to Hoe one of the best books of 1960, declaring his work was “as authentically American as Huckleberry Finn.”
Clark was working for Ashland Oil in 1956 when he married Ruth Bocook of Catlettsburg. At the wedding, they were attended by his second cousin, Hall of Fame writer Jesse Stuart, and his wife, Naomi Deane.
Clark returned to UK in 1963 to finish his degree, serving as a writer in residence and publishing three more books: Goodbye Kate (1964), The Champion of Sourwood Mountain (1966) and Sourwood Tales (1968). He graduated in 1967 and spent the next 18 years as a teacher and writer in residence at UK’s Somerset Community College.
The Clarks moved to Farmville, Virginia, in 1985. He taught at Longwood University and later Hampton-Sydney College. Many of his early books were out of print by 1991, so the Jesse Stuart Foundation republished many of them.
After a three-decade hiatus of new work, seven more Clark books were published: To Leave My Heart at Catlettsburg (1999), By Way of the Forked Stick (2000), Creeping from Winter (2002), Miss America Kissed Caleb: Stories (2003), To Find a Birdsong (2007), To Catch an Autumn (2007) and A Heap of Hills (2011).
Clark died March 15, 2009, at the age of 80 at his Farmville home.