WOODLAND HILLS : Alumnus Aims to Spruce Up Pierce Campus

Bill Clark stopped walking, bent down, and picked up a beer bottle lying in a street near Pierce College.

Although he’s not a maintenance worker at Pierce, Clark’s concern for the school’s appearance compelled him to act.

“The campus should be an inspiration to learning, not a detraction,” Clark said later as he discussed plans to improve his alma mater.

On April 16, he plans to enlist the services of students and alumni to restore a sign that once spelled out the name of the college against a hill overlooking the football stadium. Last week, maintenance workers removed five-foot tall weeds that had kept the sign--once visible from five miles away--hidden for 15 years.

Clark made Pierce his project three years ago, when he returned to take music classes and saw that his school was not the same.

“I saw shabby buildings, plants withered and trees dying,” Clark said. “But more than that I saw a crushed spirit.”

The administrators were singing the “no money blues,” the class of ’64 graduate said. His reply: “So what are we going to do about it?”

Clark set out volunteering for the Foundation for Pierce College and, within a year, formed the Alumni Connection, an auxiliary of the foundation.

Clark, who calls himself “an idea man,” helped create Alumni Park--a five-acre park filled with Christmas trees and wildflowers in 1992. Last fall, he called all alumni absent from the school for more than a decade home for a homecoming celebration.

He recently persuaded a Calabasas nursery to donate plants for a campuswide sprucing up. Future goals include painting buildings that haven’t seen new paint in 15 years, staging an alumni 10K race and an alumni golf tournament.

Clark thinks that efforts have spawned hope among the administrators.

“You can only be down so long,” Clark said. “You either give into it or do something about it.”