John R. Clark

John R. Clark age 85 passed away July 13, 2017. He was born on June 12, 1932 to Grover Cleveland and Viva Runyan Clark. Graveside services will be held at 10:00 A.M., Monday, July 17, 2017, at Union Cemetery, north of Centropolis. Mr. Clark will lie in state from 1:00 P.M. to 5:00 P.M., Sunday, July 16, 2017, at Dengel & Son Mortuary. John attended Brubaker Grade School and Appanoose High School, graduating in 1949. He earned a BSc in Mathematics and BA in History & Political Science from Ottawa University. He also completed a Master of Science degree from the University of Kansas. In 1962, he was granted a National Science Foundation Academic Fellowship by Harvard University where he studied mathematics and computer programming. He served in the United States Army from September 1953 to June 1955 attaining the rank of Corporal with the first guided missile group. His entry into the vocational world was with North American Aviation in Los Angeles, where he was assigned the work of performing data analysis on the computer. He later worked at MacDonald Aircraft in St. Louis. He left the aircraft industry and headed to California to become a teacher. After one year at Long Beach Polytechnic, he was admitted to the mathematics department of Orange Coast College, where he taught classes from Algebra to Differential Equations. He worked his way up the academic ranks to full professor and moved from mathematics to computer science. In addition to teaching, he wrote the state adopted 3rd generation computer curriculum. He coauthored two programming books and was listed in the credits of a film and a television production. He was president of the Orange County Mathematics Association and of the Radio Communication Monitoring Association. At Orange Coast College, he was selected as the first Faculty Member of the Year. Two years after he retired to Arkansas, the Orange Coast College Computing Center was named in his honor. The family suggests memorial contributions to Appanoose Museum c/o Dengel & Son Mortuary, 235 S. Hickory, Ottawa, Kansas 66067. Family and friends are encouraged to post their condolences and memories on John’s Tribute Wall at www.dengelmortuary.com