REQUIESCAT IN PACE FOR A FINE DOCTOR & A WONDERFUL FRIEND

With Tuesday's shocking news the untimely death of surgeon David Clark just days short of his 46th birthday Cape Girardeau and our health care community have suffered a dreadful blow.

If anywhere there was a more highly skilled general surgeon, I don't know of that person. If anywhere there lived a more devoted father and husband, or a kinder fellow with a sweeter disposition, or a better citizen, I've never met him. Cape Girardeau and the State of Missouri have lost a dedicated leader in the medical community, whose disarming modesty and basic human decency masked the formidable training and the expertness that came from years of diligent application.

I have lost a wonderful friend, a fraternity brother, an occasional jogging partner and a gifted physician on whom I relied for treatment. Cape Central High sports teams have lost a steadfast booster whose unselfconsious enthusiasm was contagious. And of course the family he headed has been dealt a crushing blow in losing him at such a young age.

They will persevere, as will we all, cheated though we feel at having been allowed only 45 years from so agreeable a character as he. But as we go on through the grieving, proceeding onto the business of living, we shall do so with smiling faces, as we recall the privilege and honor of having known a man of the character and spirit and quality of David Clark.

How very proud his family must be of Dave, and of his life, and how he ennobled all who knew him by the way he lived it.

"Requiescat in pace."

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Liberal columnist Stephen Stark writing in the Jan. 7 issue of the Boston Globe:

"Sure it may be fashionable in some circles to trash the Reagan years, or to revel in the bad news of the past six months because it seems to indicate that the successes of the last decade were built on a house of cards. But like the Republicans who spent the years from 1936 to 1968 trying futilely to prove the New Deal had been a mistake, Democrats who spend the '90s largely trying to repudiate the '80s are making an error."

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"It will surprise few readers of these columns to know that the Vietnam Syndrome remains alive among college elders. The faculty senate of the California State University system has just asked that ROTC programs be ordered off the system's 20 campuses. Fortunately, the professors don't have final say, and this latest lecture is likely to be ignored."

Wall Street Journal