Year in, year out

Have you met Gary Clark? You may have heard his story or seen his face (or maybe that hip illustration of him) over the past few months. If you’re wondering why, it all dates back to 1962, when he made his first gift to Ohio University. He will tell you it wasn’t much, but it was what the young OHIO graduate could afford.

He made another donation the next year. And again, the year after that. He’s kept it up for 59 years in a row now, making him OHIO’s longest-running annual donor.

Gary’s OHIO story starts in 1956, on a fateful campus visit in the spring of his senior year of high school. As it does for so many Bobcats, the quintessential beauty of the Athens Campus won him over.

“When I first came down here, the impactful thing at the time was the College Green,” Gary, BSCOM ’60, recalls. “It looked like everybody’s view of what a campus ought to look like.”

Gary studied business, preparing him for what would become a successful career in corporate business development and marketing. However, it was outside the classroom where he found his most formative experiences, many of which were connected to his passion for singing.

He sang in the Ohio University Chorus and in the Ohio University Singers. As a member of the Phi Kappa Tau fraternity, he sang formally in competitions like the Spring Torch Sing and informally during pinning ceremonies or whenever the mood struck.

These experiences and more, including landing his first job through a connection in OHIO’s student chapter of the Society for the Advancement of Management, shaped Gary in a lasting way.

“What you come away with [at OHIO] is a degree and academic experiences that you hope to apply as you go forward in life. And no one is 100 percent successful at that, but everyone is successful to a point that they wouldn’t have been had they not had the experience,” Gary says. “So many of the significant events of my life occurred here.”

That is what has fueled Gary’s remarkable pattern of generosity, which over nearly six decades has impacted hundreds of thousands of students, supported the expansion and transformation of campus facilities, and helped preserve the timeless traditions that make Ohio University one of a kind.

And Gary’s not done yet. He plans to continue his annual tradition of giving and hopes that his story inspires others to start their own.

“If you recognize the benefit of you having come here in the first place, you can then share back part of the reward you reap from that investment,” Gary says. “So that then, the institution survives and can do for others what was done for you.”

To learn more about Gary and how you can start your own legacy of giving today, visit ohio.edu/gary.

Feature image: Gary Clark, BSCOM ’60, holds a meaningful record at Ohio University. He has given to his alma mater every year—for the past 59 years—making this Bobcat OHIO’s longest-running annual donor.