Master Thanks-Giver Counts Her Blessings

Frances ​“Bitsie” Clark isn’t thankful for having been confined to two rooms in a senior living facility for the first year of Covid-19. She is thankful for how she was able to roll with it.

“People spend an awful lot of time talking about being depressed with this Covid thing,” Clark, who turned 90 on Oct. 30, said from her apartment at the Whitney Center, where she moved after 44 years playing a leading role in New Haven’s arts, political, and senior circles.

A social creature by nature, Clark, too, wishes she could have left her room before vaccinations made communal gathering possible again this year at the Center.

But she looked at the bright side.

“I loved getting up in the morning and not having to worry about getting anything done” except exploring her interests, she said during a Thanksgiving-themed edition of WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program.

She took the opportunity to read books. Fiction. History. Politics. Book after book after book.

“I have never learned so much. I read so many books!” Clark exclaimed, proceeding to a riff on how Daniel DeFoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year illustrated how the human response to plagues of the 1600s resembled the response to Covid-19.

It’s impossible to spend more than a minute with Bitsie Clark without surrendering to optimism and enthusiasm for civic life. New Haveners learned that when she ran the Arts Council from 1983 – 2002 and piloted the creation of the Audubon Arts District; then when she served as an irrepressibly positive and collegial city alder; then when she built up the Home Haven network of seniors looking to stay in their homes while connecting to services and to contemporaries.

“Even if things look absolutely awful, try to look at the bright side,” Clark advised listeners.

She offered examples of how she did that over her years, and why she’s grateful that life’s unforeseen curve balls led to blessings.

Her first job in New Haven originally gave her reasons to complain, if she had chosen to.

Clark married in her 20s, followed her husband to New Haven, and looked for work. The only available local job was with the Girl Scouts.

The Girl Scouts? If there was one thing Clark never considered herself, it was … a Girl Scout. She grew up with less than zero interest in the Girl Scouts. Her mother urged her to join. She told her mother that Girl Scouts activities weren’t her speed.

But she took the New Haven job, for lack of alternatives. She ended up spending 11 years learning how to work with volunteers. How to identify their interests and strengths. How to run an organization.

She loved every minute of it, she said. And she developed skills that would help her take on other challenges.

Another curve came with efforts to have children. She spent 12 years trying to get pregnant, with no luck. So Clark and her then-husband adopted their son Jonathan in 1967.

Nine months later, Clark became pregnant with their daughter Mary.

Her two children have been a lifelong blessing. They returned their gratitude last month when they organized a 90th birthday bash for Clark with old friends at the Elm City Club (formerly known as the Graduates Club).

Another curve ball came when her husband had a mid-life crisis, and Clark found herself divorced. She wasn’t happy about that.

But she did see an opportunity: Now she had to work outside the home again. Which she was eager to do. In 1983 she became the executive director of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. She loved going to work every day in downtown New Haven and interacting with people of all walks of life.

“It made up in kind of a way for not having a husband,” Clark said. She became a fixture of the city’s civic life.

The Arts Council was a small operation when Clark took the helm. Its basement office had a 10-person capacity.

By the time she left in 2002, the Council had redeveloped Audubon Street into a bustling urban arts mini-neighborhood, with hundreds of apartments mixed in with storefronts, the Creative Arts Workshop, Koffee?, Educational Center for the Arts, Neighborhood Music School, and a five-story headquarters housing an Arts Council suite, the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, and other local institutions.

In the ​“Dateline” interview (watch it above), Clark revealed how Yale tried to trick her out of relinquishing a long-term benefit of that project: the Arts Council owns land on the district on which Yale has a 99-year lease. The Arts Council receives an annual $100,000 check from Yale for that lease. It will continue for the 99 years. Then the Yale buildings on that land revert to the Council’s ownership.

Yale’s lawyers thought Clark would be an easy mark. They visited her to tell her she could make lots of quick money for the Arts Council by selling the land to Yale for a few hundred thousand dollars. ​“The Arts Council won’t be here in 99 years, Bitsie. Yale will be,” they advised her.

Clark didn’t necessarily agree. But even if she did, she understood that a few hundred thousand dollars are worth far less than $10 million plus the value of prime downtown buildings for the Arts Council in the existing arrangement. She congenially sent the lawyers packing. Sorry, no deal.

One of countless examples of how Bitsie Clark has been our blessing.

After her WNHH interview wound down, Clark prepared to host a gathering she organized for that evening at the Whitney Center featuring a guest presentation by Community Foundation President Will Ginsberg.

“I’m not minding being 90,” Clark reflected.

Of course she’s not minding. She’s too busy reaching with thanks for that half-full jar of life.