– A lifelong High Plains resident from Lamar, Colorado and a surviving witness of the Dust Bowl. Clark was the daughter of a rancher and a Broadway dancer,
Louise Walton, who relocated to the prairie to treat a bronchial condition. As a child, Clark suffered from
dust pneumonia. Clark was an only child who doctors did not think would survive past 1935, due to her diagnosis. She slept most of the day and was awakened only by the sight and smell of her father’s cigar smoke. As a little girl, she wore dresses made of old onion sacks, due to her family’s poverty as a result of both the Great Depression and the drought.