A Close- Up Look At People Who Matter : A Life of Dedication Adds Up

When Philip S. Clarke showed up at Los Angeles Valley College in September, 1949, he was asked to teach a science course, although his specialty is mathematics.

So began a 46-year teaching career.

“I didn’t know anything about chemistry, but they put me in with it,” said Clarke, who was twice chairman of the college’s mathematics department. The last of the original faculty, he ended an era when he retired in May.

“A lot of us were starting college teaching for the first time,” said Clarke, probably the youngest member of the faculty when he joined the school at age 23. “It was a pioneering spirit at that time.”

Clarke has seen Valley College grow, moving from its original campus at Van Nuys High School to its current site at Burbank Boulevard and Fulton Avenue.

Two years after it opened, the college held classes in only the small bungalows on campus. A barn with cows stood on the site where the engineering building would be built. The teachers’ parking lot, accessible by only a dirt road, flooded in the winter and so was dubbed Lake Kersey, for Vierling Kersey, the first college director.

After Clarke took up running in the 1950s, he began working an additional position as assistant track coach for two years and later as the cross-country coach. He still runs 30 to 40 miles a week, one of his hobbies, along with hiking and gardening, which he plans to focus on more in retirement.

He also enjoys working on math puzzles. But his enthusiasm for the field has limits. Once during a running race, he joined up with another runner who was also a mathematics professor, and the two launched into a seemingly endless discussion about Pythagorean numbers.

“I finally got so tired of thinking about it,” said Clarke, who pushed ahead of his colleague to get away from the conversation. “It was just taking too much energy.”

After so many decades in the field, Clarke can understand why some people don’t like adding numbers. He’s not entirely fond of it either.

“I don’t like to do a lot of computations,” Clarke confessed. “I don’t like to go up to the board and do the arithmetic. I’m no more accurate than anyone else.”

Fortunately, mathematics is much more than just arithmetic, despite the image many math-phobics gleaned from boring elementary school classes.

“People get the idea that math is just cranking out numbers,” Clarke said. But it is not about following a lot of stuffy rules.

Higher mathematics requires “an ability to not be locked into any particular way of thinking,” Clarke said. It takes abstract reasoning, insight and imagination to grasp the principles of higher math.

Some people who have the skill and ability for mathematics may not even give it a chance, he said. One female student had been terrible at math in high school, but discovered an aptitude for it once she got to Valley College. Another of Clarke’s students, a former music major, took to the subject so well he became a mathematics professor himself.

Seeing students progress like that is one of the rewards Clarke has received in his long teaching career.

“It’s a challenge to learn it, and it never stops being a challenge,” said Clarke.

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