Obituaries.

William J. Brophy, professor of history at Stephen F. Austin State University (SFASU), died on September 21, 2004, age sixty-seven. He began his long career at SFASU in 1964 and remained active through the spring semester of 2004 until emphysema forced him into the hospital.

A native of Boston who was always a Red Sox fan, Bill moved with his family to Texas when he was young. After service in the U.S. Navy from 1954 to 1957, he earned a bachelor's degree in psychology in 1961 from North Texas State University and then pursued graduate studies in history. He received his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in 1974.

His experiences living and studying in Texas and Nashville amid the civil rights revolution inspired him to study the historical background of that movement with an emphasis on the Texas experience. His lifelong concern about how society treats people was reinforced by his studies in psychology and his graduate study of the history of the civil rights movement. Countless students have been grateful for his intense interest in their personal and academic welfare regardless of their ethnic background, their age, or the quality of their academic preparation.

He came to Stephen F. Austin State College (as it was then named) in 1964 as an instructor in history. His colleagues and students remember him best as a dedicated teacher, but he also filled many administrative posts: chairman of the history department from 1977 to 1984; associate vice-president for academic affairs (1984); interim vice-president for academic affairs (1985-1986); dean of liberal arts (1986-1991); interim dean of sciences and mathematics (1986-1987); interim president of SFASU (December 1991-August 1992); and director of a tutorial dormitory (1992-2004).

Despite a heavy load of teaching and administrative duties, he was an active scholar. Probably he was proudest of an article in the Journal of American History on the Cuban Missile Crisis and a collaboration with Mary Beth Norton and others on A Brief History of a People and a Nation.

Bill was a warmhearted person who delighted in his family. He and his wife, Sue, doted on their three daughters, Rebekah, Heidi, and Holly. The death of Rebekah from cancer at a young age made Bill even more sensitive to others peoples' troubles. In 1994 Bill suffered another tragedy when Sue died suddenly. Later, he regained happiness when he formed a new family with his widow, Shelly Fare, and her son. [JOSEPH A. DEVINE, Stephen F. Austin State University]

Thomas D. Clark, a founding member and former president of the Southern Historical Association, died in Lexington, Kentucky, on June 28, 2005, two weeks shy of his 102nd birthday. As those who heard Clark speak without notes at the Houston and Memphis meetings can attest, he was an extraordinarily vital and engaged centenarian. Less than a week before his death he was proofreading the text of his forthcoming memoirs, which will be published next spring.

Born in Louisville, Mississippi, on July 14, 1903, Clark quit school after the seventh grade and spent several years working on the family's cotton farm and at a local sawmill. He also served as a cabin boy and deckhand on a dredge boat on the Pearl River. At age eighteen, he returned to Choctaw County (Mississippi) Agricultural High School, where he played football for four .years and earned his diploma. With profits earned from raising and selling ten acres of cotton, in 1925 he enrolled at the University of Mississippi, where he received his bachelor's degree in history.

Clark often joked that his arrival at the University of Kentucky (UK) for graduate school in 1928 had been greeted with much fanfare. When he looked out the window of the train, he noticed an enormous crowd and band waiting at the Lexington depot. "I thought Kentucky must be the friendliest place on earth," he would recall with a laugh. "Then I realized that the folks were there not on my account, but to welcome another passenger, Calvin Coolidge's vice-president, Charles Dawes."

Yet Clark quickly made his own mark in Lexington. After earning a master's degree from UK in 1929, he completed doctoral work at Duke University three years later under the direction of William K. Boyd. While working on his dissertation he was invited to join the faculty at Kentucky, which would remain his professional home for more than three decades. From 1942 to 1965, as chair of the department, he recruited or retained some of the foremost scholars in the field of southern history, including Clement Eaton, Holman Hamilton, James F. Hopkins, and Albert D. Kirwan. He was the guiding force behind the creation in 1943 of what is today the University Press of Kentucky.

When he reached the mandatory retirement age of sixty-five, Clark left UK for Bloomington, where he served from 1968 to 1973 as distinguished professor of history at Indiana University. Over the years he taught as a visiting professor at numerous universities in the United States--including Wisconsin, Harvard, Washington, and Stanford--and overseas in England, India, Austria, Greece, and Yugoslavia.

A prolific author, Clark wrote or edited more than thirty books on the American South, the westward movement, and Kentucky. Among his most influential works were his invited entry in the Rivers of America series, The Kentucky (New York, 1942); Pills, Petticoats, and Plows: The Southern Country Store (Indianapolis, 1944); The Southern Country Editor (Indianapolis, 1948); The Emerging South (New York, 1961); Kentucky: Land of Contrast (New York, 1968); The Greening of the South: The Recovery of Land and Forest (Lexington, 1984); and a four-volume history of Indiana University published in the 1970s. Generations of college students came to know Clark through A History of Kentucky (New York), which appeared in 1937 and remained standard fare for six decades.

Given his energy, outgoing personality, and reputation for making the seemingly impossible happen, it followed that the major historical organizations would reward Clark with positions of confidence and trust. He served the SHA as president (1947) and managing editor of the Journal of Southern History (1949-1952); Phi Alpha Theta as president (1957); the Mississippi Valley Historical Association as president (1956-1957); and its successor, the Organization of American Historians, as executive secretary (1970-1973).

Persons unfamiliar with Kentucky can scarcely appreciate the extent of Clark's influence and notoriety in the Bluegrass State. An untiring advocate for a host of progressive causes, most notably education reform, he did not hesitate to lobby governors or state legislators--many of whom were his former students--on behalf of measures he championed. He is considered the father of the Kentucky state archives in Frankfort and the department of special collections and archives at UK. Clark personally gathered many of the ledgers, account books, letters, and other materials that formed the nucleus of those collections. In 1942, during one of his many foraging expeditions, he drove his Dodge automobile on weak wartime tires through eight southern states in search of treasures that he knew were likely to be destroyed. He charmed housewives, store owners, farmers, and plant managers into allowing him to take their records off to be preserved. "I knew their language," he once recalled. "They quickly found out that I wasn't some jaybird drifting around all over the South."

In appreciation of his myriad contributions to the commonwealth, the Kentucky legislature in 1990 took the unprecedented step of honoring Clark by declaring him Kentucky' s Historian Laureate for Life. On that occasion the governor of the state praised him as "Kentucky's greatest treasure."

At the time of his death he was looking forward to attending the renaming of the home of the Kentucky Historical Society in his honor. Festivities at the Thomas D. Clark Center for Kentucky History went on as scheduled in Frankfort on July 9 in accordance with his family's wishes.

Clark's marriage of sixty-two years to Elizabeth Turner Clark ended with her death in 1995. He subsequently married Loretta Gilliam Brock, who survives him, as do his son and daughter, three grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren. [THOMAS H. APPLETON JR., Eastern Kentucky University]